Beyond the media’s radar: Introducing the Intifada Non-Media-Based Dataset

ABSTRACT

This article presents the Intifada Non-Media-Based Dataset (INMBD). Drawing primarily on the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) daily field reports, the INMBD contains day-level observations of wide-ranging types, modes, and forms of contentious events involving multitudes of parties and actors in the Israeli-Palestinian cycle of contention, known as the First Intifada (1987–1993). Each event – defined as a collective action, claim, message, or decision that pertain explicitly and directly to systems of authority that institutionally structure ethno-nationalist relations – comes with a date, short description, type, location, actors involved, and whether the events result in injury, fatality, and damage to property. After making a case for a new dataset, presenting the particularities of the dataset’s sources, structure, inclusion and coding rules, and discussing its limitations, we offer a descriptive illustration of the dataset’s potential uses, specifically an elaboration of the association between state repression and insurgent violence. The richness and distinctness of information INMBD contains facilitate the identification of the multifaceted, contingent, polyadic, and context-sensitive dynamics of cycles of conflict and contention.

KEYWORDS:

• State sources
• media sources
• contentious politics
• repression
• violence
• Intifada

Acknowledgments

This article benefited from useful comments and suggestions made by Yehuda Magid, Tom Maher, Gilad Rosen, Sid Tarrow, Sarah Soule, and International Interactions reviewers, for which we are grateful. Special thanks go to our research assistants: Meydan Ben Barak, Alice Baron, Allison Grey, Sharon Hasson, Asaf Leibovitz, Gil Mymon, Naama Tridel, and Michael Ziv Kenet – for their help with collecting and coding the data.

Supplementary material

The supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ See, for example, Nils Weidmann (2015) on the veracity problem that becomes acute when relaying on international news reports.

² Integration of datasets is a promising albeit highly challenging and resource-demanding possibility; hence, the rarity of UCDP-like overarching research domains (see Sandberg and Melander 2013).

³ Combining media and non-media-based sources (for example, Loyle, Sullivan, and Davenport 2014) is admittedly promising, yet comes with a price, such as precluding the possibility of validating and assessing the media-based data, and of exploring the relationship between media coverage and dynamics of contention.

⁴ We reported the mid-month date for 102 events, amounting to 0.43% of the events.

⁵ Twenty-seven events were excluded for failing to meet the requirement of involving more than two individuals.

⁶ In order of appearance, monthly aggregated correlations are: 0.64; 0.56; 0.76; 0.31; 0.44; 0.42 (all statistically significant at 0.01 level).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (0958743) and the Israeli Science Foundation (1232/14); US-NSF [0958743]; Israel Science Foundation [1232/14].