External Support for Nonviolent Campaigns Dataset (EX-D)

Does external assistance help or hurt nonviolent campaigns? The EX-D is the first systematic, global dataset identifying different forms of aid provided to civil resistance campaigns with maximalist goals. The study is limited to maximalist protest movements whose peak years occurred within the 2000-2014 timeframe, which generated a sample of 68 campaigns. We define external assistance as support for a movement that originated beyond the sovereign boundaries of the country in which the campaign operates. External supporters might include foreign governments, organizations, and individuals. The data take account of all reported incidents of support, encouragement, or direct participation in civil resistance campaigns by international third parties. The dataset features incident-level observations of external assistance provided to all known civil resistance campaigns occurring in our period of study, as defined in the NAVCO 2.1 dataset (Chenoweth & Shay 2019). Because we also capture support provided in each campaigns pre and post-phases, the dates of some observations will lie outside the 2000-2014 period. We also provide data on 5 randomly-selected cases where support was provided to create an “enabling environment,” but where no campaigns emerged. Research assistants collected the data using a uniform search string on variety of news sources in LexisNexis to identify supporters and recipients of assistance occurring during each campaign. They then supplemented these search strings with searches of additional data sources to obtain further information about each incident of support. A separate team of coders applied uniform filters to the AidData.org database in order to identify applicable instances of Official Development Assistance (ODA), and Other Official Flows (OOF). See the Codebook for more information.