Country codes

This page lists all "countries" included in WeSIS and their numeric codes. Defining a country, political unit or a state member of the international system is challenging. In order to ensure cross-comparability to other major data collections in the social sciences, we rely on the coding by the Corrrelates of War project (COW).

Identifying entities

Contemporary states existent in 2016 form the basis of this list. COW applies a minimum definition for actors to qualify as a state member of the international system since 1816 (for a detailed discussion and refinements see COW's "State System Membership List, v2016"):

• Prior to 1920, the entity must have population greater than 500,000 and have had diplomatic missions at or above the rank of charge d’affaires with Britain and France.
• After 1920, the entity must be a member of the United Nations or League of Nations, or have a population greater than 500,000 and receive diplomatic missions from two major powers.

Furthermore, looking back until 1880 territorial changes are tracked and related entities are included in the newly created list. Changes are based on COW's "Territorial Change, 1816-2014 (v5) Data Set" (Tir et al. 1998). This way, the list helps in finding the correct numeric COW code when coding data for a certain point in time.

Disclaimer: The inclusion of an entity in WeSIS is based on scientific and analytical grounds. This precludes any judgments about which territories qualify as countries. For this reason, recognizing entities in WeSIS should not be interpreted as judgments about sovereign claims to disputed territories.

Entity codes

The list shows all politically relevant entities that used to be present in contemporary countries' territory at some point in time (regardless of the type of relation or the actual overlap in territories). Please use the search bar to the right to filter the table when looking for specific entity codes, "country names" or related entities.

The column "pop.over.500k" is a dummy indicating whether the contemporary entity (left-hand sided) has a population over 500.000 (=1), or not (=0) (Source: Worldbank 2019). This threshold is mentioned in the grant proposal and gives guidance in setting priorities for the data collection. In case of doubt, please talk to your PIs.

Amendments and limitations

The following entities have been amended manually:

• Yugoslavia: Changed name to Serbia (offical CoW successor)
• Czech Republic: Changed start date of dependency on Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1918, added dependency on Austria-Hungary (1880-1918)
• Manchukuo: Removed absorptions by Japan and Russia, added final absorption by China in 1945
• Kosovo: Added dependency on Serbia (1918-2008)
• Montenegro: Added dependency on Serbia (1918-2006)
• Bosnia-Herzegovina/Croatia/Slovenia: Added dependencies on Austria-Hungary (1880-1918)
• Serbia: Removed dependency on Austria-Hungary
• South Sudan: Added dependency on Sudan (1880-2011)

The temporal domain of the territorial change dataset starts in 1816 and ends in 2008. This might overlook recent changes. Such incidents, however, will be manually coded. Furthermore, the list does not differentiate between partial or full absorption at this point. It simply shows that at some point in time there was an overlap, no matter the size. Likewise, the list does not specifically point out colonial dependencies. Colonies often bear the same numeric code as the contemporary entity on this territory.

Relation to other schemes

There are many other country coding schemes out there like ISO 3166-1 or the scheme applied by the "Varieties of Democracy" Project (V-Dem) - each with a different scope regarding time and entities, though. V-Dem's country codes in particular aim at a consistent time series whereas COW usually treats entities as "fixed" or "separated". For example, COW assigns three codes to Korea, North Korea and South Korea while V-Dem subsumes Korea and South Korea under one code. This makes it cumbersome though, when trying to disaggregate data if desirable. For this reason, data for WeSIS is collected for each entity separately applying COW codes.

However, as COW has become a standard on its own, V-Dem includes COW codes as well making it easy to merge data. Likewise, packages like countrycode for R or kountry for Stata provide valuable tools to convert COW codes to other schemes if needed.

Misc

Contributors: Bastian Becker, Fabian Besche, Nils Düpont, and Heiner Fechner

Revisions:

• CRC internal release on July 16, 2018‎
• Static list extended by related entities and replaced as searchable data.table on February 20, 2019
• Dummy "pop.over.500k" added on February 23, 2019

Sources

• Correlates of War Project. 2016. "State System Membership List, v2016." http://www.correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/cow-country-codes/cow-country-codes/at_download/file (Accessed July 26, 2018).
• Tir, Jaroslav, Philip Schafer, Paul Diehl, and Gary Goertz. 1998. "Territorial Changes, 1816-1996: Procedures and Data." Conflict Management and Peace Science 16: 89-97.
• Worldbank. 2019. "Population, total". https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.pop.totl (Accessed February 22, 2019).