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 and/or administrative changes are tracked and related entities are included in the newly created list. Changes are based on COW's "Colonial Contiguity Data". 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 entities that WeSIS recognizes. It details

that used to be present in contemporary countries' territory at some point in time

(regardless of 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

In general, the temporal domain of COW starts in 1816. Yet, WeSIS does not recognize entities beyond the time frame defined by the earliest or latest year in the colums "independent_list" and "relation_year". In some cases, changes have been made with respect to the start or end year of independence or a relation. These are documented in the column remarks. Most notable are deviances when a country not yet gained full independence regarding foreign policy - a defining criterion for COW - but had autonomy or self-government over domestic policies. As social policies fall into this realm, time frames may have been adjusted.

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 from and to COW codes 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
• List replaced with new version containing more detailed description of types of relationship on February 21, 2020
• Old list archived on February 21, 2020

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).
• Correlates of War Project. 2016. "Colonial Contiguity Data, 1816-2016. Version 3.1" [1] (Accessed January 10, 2020).
• 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).