International Relations Datasets

This guide provides recommendations on freely available datasets relevant to International Relations topics. It is not an exhaustive list and instead should be considered a launching point for research. A listing of general data repositories is available in the box below for additional consideration.

• Environmental Datasets: Includes a range of datasets about environmental indicators, climate change, impacts and vulnerabilities, as well as surface temperature data.
• Peacebuilding and Human Security Datasets: Includes datasets about displacement, peace accords, ethnic-minority groups, and global peacefulness.
• Conflict, War and Military Security Datasets: Includes a variety of datasets that look at arms transfers, military expenditures, civil war, armed conflict, political instability, alliances, and more.
• Terrorism, Protests and Revolution Datasets: A selection of datasets looking at worldwide terrorism, suicide attacks, political terror, nonviolent and violent campaigns, state failure, activism and more.
• Economic & Energy Datasets: Datasets from researchers, international and governmental organizations on world development indicators, imports, exports, poverty, unemployment, oil and gas production, emissions, minerals and CO2 captures. 
• Human Rights & Social and Governmental Indicators Datasets: Datasets looking at demographics, rule of law and governance, issues affecting children, human rights, displacement, and world development indicators.

Interested in a topic not detailed on this guide or looking for a dataset not recommended here? Try conducting searches within these general social science repositories and datasets. Note: Within ICPSR you will encounter data that is restricted and require data usage agreements for access. Undergraduates are rarely granted access and access can take months for approval, so it is best to avoid selecting these datasets for semester long projects.