Dataset of Armed Sunni and Shia Islamist Groups (DASSIG)

Conflict research is increasingly interested in grasping the exponential growth of armed Islamist groups in the civil wars of Muslim-majority countries over the past eighty years. Yet a crucial flaw of existing scholarship is that it misses the Shia factor – it overwhelmingly focuses on Sunni, and less on Shia cases and dynamics, with adverse empirical and theoretical implications. The Dataset of Armed Sunni and Shia Islamist Groups (DASSIG) is, to date, the most comprehensive list of major armed Sunni and Shia Islamist groups, for the first time bringing together information on major Shia and Sunni Islamist armed groups which have taken part in a conflict involving more than 25 battle-related deaths annually between 1945 and 2021. Building on the UCDP datasets on state and nonstate armed conflict and one-sided conflict, and the Pro-Government Militias Database (PGMD) produced by Carey and Mitchell, we built DASSIG, adding an additional 88 Shia and 2 Sunni groups to bring the total to 228 (99 Shia, 129 Sunni), in order to examine whether and, if so, to what extent, the patterns of creation, evolution and interaction of armed Islamism differ for Shia and Sunni groups. In particular, we were interested in examining whether the timing and locations of emergence, and the characteristics of those locations (e.g. multisectarian, low/high intensity conflict) differed between predominantly Shia and predominantly Sunni armed Islamist groups. We were also interested in whether sectarian difference has come to play a larger role in the growth of armed Islamism since the 2000s, with the regional increase in political sectarianization since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and how this compared to Shia-Sunni Islamist interaction following the Iranian Revolution of 1979 – both of which are listed as key events in the sectarianization of the region. And we wanted to substantiate whether the argument that Islamists are predominantly rebel groups holds for both Shia and Sunni armed Islamists over time. DASSIG lists all major Islamist groups which we were able to identify and met our inclusion criteria, detailing the date of their creation, the main country in which they operate and any other countries in which they have carried out armed attacks, coding whether they are predominantly Sunni or Shia qua membership, whether they started out as rebel or pro-government and whether they changed position over time, whether they have been influenced/supported by the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s-1980s, and whether they have had negative and/or positive interactions with each other across sect.