Introducing MIP: A New Dataset on U.S. Interventions, 1776-2017

• In Event: The Evolution of US Military Interventions and State-building Projects

Abstract

Over the past six decades, foreign military interventions have transformed from aberrations to regular occurrences in international relations (Pickering and Mitchell 2017). The United States (US) remains the leader of such a militaristic foreign policy. As it stands, the US seems to operate without any clear guidelines for when it employs force abroad, and the consequences of such interventions remain blurred and contradictory (Haas 1994). Thus we ask, what does the record of US military of force look like, and what benefits does an increasing reliance on force offer as a foreign policy choice?
In this paper, we introduce The Military Intervention Project (MIP), an innovative, comprehensive dataset of all US military missions since the country’s founding, including covert operations and drone strikes. According to MIP, the U.S. has undertaken over 500 international military missions since 1776, with more than half of these missions undertaken between 1950 and 2017. Furthermore, over 25% of the missions have occurred in the post-Cold War period. This paper discusses the formulation of the data, the historical trends and correlations found within the data, and the future usages of this dataset. MIP consists of over 600 cases of the usage of force abroad from 1776 to 2017 as well as hundreds of indicators that measure the domestic and international costs of all US military involvements. Unlike existing databases, this project measures every instance of the US usage of force, including displays and threats of force and underexplored covert operations and drone strikes. For a deeper scope of analysis, case study narratives of every mission complement the dataset. Moreover, MIP provides over 100 variables related to intervention, including a wide range of economic, geopolitical, domestic, human rights, and cost-oriented measures for the US and its target countries. The findings from this new dataset will be of interest to scholars in International Relations and American Politics as well as foreign policymakers.

Authors

• Monica Duffy Toft, Tufts University

• Sidita Kushi, Tufts University