Revolutionary days: Introducing the Latin American Guerrillas Dataset

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed an impressive expansion in the analysis of the causes, dynamics and legacies of internal armed conflicts. However, two relevant limitations persist. First, standard conflict datasets suffer from selection bias. And second, most available data lack a temporal approach that facilitates the analysis of insurgent lifecycles from the inception until the demobilization of non-state armed groups. To partially fill this gap, this article presents a novel dataset on revolutionary socialist insurgencies that were created in Latin America (LA) between 1950 and 2016. The Latin American Guerrillas Dataset (LAGD) covers the actions of 90 guerrilla organizations in 19 countries in the region, including annual level data on a variety of variables, such as level of success, political wings, rebel diplomacy, rebel governance, or number of combatants, among others. The LAGD represents one of the first systematic efforts for collecting comparative evidence on insurgencies operating in LA and should facilitate rigorous analyses on the divergent pathways of armed groups from a processual perspective, while dealing with extant issues of selection bias.