A media-informed global dataset on conflict/cooperation dynamics in transboundary rivers

Cooperation is fundamental to the functioning of human societies. Various cooperation models have been constructed with the tools of game theory to model communication (negotiation) processes among actors, generating conflict/cooperation behaviour. However, due to lack of large-scale empirical datasets, rigorous empirical tests of these models are rare, limiting their usefulness for managing social conflicts. We developed a global dataset on conflict/cooperation communication events in transboundary river management including six most salient elements: involved actors (“who” and “to whom”), discussed issues (“say what”), interaction modes (“through which channel”), sentiment polarities of conflict/ cooperation (“with what effects”), the basin context (“in which basin”) and when. This dataset contains 9382 communication events obtained by human coding from the newspaper articles included in over 760 media outlets across 105 transboundary rivers involving 84 countries or regions, with a time coverage from 1977 to 2022. This dataset provides the first-hand data for development, calibration and validation of cooperation communication process models for improving the modelling capacity, thus assist in mitigating the conflicts facing the world.