International Military Deployments Dataset (IMDT), 1962–2022

The International Military Deployments Dataset (IMDT) is a dyadic dataset of 21,217 country-country-year observations recording interstate military deployments worldwide between 1962 and 2022. It covers 173 deploying states and 174 host countries and records: troop numbers (disaggregated where possible into combat personnel and military observers); mission types (peacekeeping, counter-insurgency, training, basing, maritime security, air security); organisational mandates (UN, NATO, EU, AU, ECOWAS, ECOMOG, ECCAS, NARC, SADC, OSCE, US-led non-NATO coalitions, other regional organisations); a derived host-consent indicator; and free-text fields for operation names, contextual notes, and provenance. Countries are coded using the Correlates of War (COW) numerical country code system, making the data directly compatible with ATOP, the COW Alliance Data, the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset, the Defense Cooperation Agreements Dataset, the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, and other established quantitative IR resources. Source attribution. The primary empirical source is the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Military Balance annual publications (1962-2022 editions), supplemented by the United Nations Department of Peace Operations peacekeeping databases, NATO and Canadian Department of National Defence web archives, Allen, Flynn and Martinez Machain (2022) for US deployment cross-validation, and Vignoli and Coticchia (2022) for Italian operations. Of the 21,217 observations, 20,747 (97.8%) are coded directly from Military Balance country entries; 454 are gap-filled from secondary sources; and 16 are constructed by temporal interpolation between anchor years. The IMDT records factual deployment information extracted from Military Balance country entries and recoded into a novel dyadic Correlates of War framework. The dataset does not reproduce the textual content, analytical commentary, editorial assessments, or organisational structure of any Military Balance edition. Users of the IMDT should cite both the IMDT paper (Maltsev, Gatskovskaya and Stasevski, forthcoming, Conflict Management and Peace Science) and the Military Balance (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, annual) in any work derived from this dataset.