About One-Sided Violence

One-sided violence occurs frequently during war. Systematic research on this form of violence, however, only started to emerge since the 1990s. Most existing data sets only include information about the most serious episodes of one-sided violence like mass killings or genocides, or are temporarily or spatially highly aggregated.

The KOSVED project offers detailed information about particular instances of one-sided violence. The Figures below taken from Schneider and Bussmann (2012) show that one-sided violence does not follow a random pattern.

When using KOSVED, please cite the data set article: Schneider, Gerald and Margit Bussmann. 2013. “Accounting for the Dynamics of One-Sided Violence: Introducing KOSVED”. Journal of Peace Research 50: (5) and, if needed, the codebook: Margit Bussmann and Gerald Schneider (with Constantin Ruhe, Adam Scharpf and Roos van der Haer). 2011. Konstanz One-Sided Violence Event Dataset (KOSVED) Codebook. Version 2.0.

 

Figure 1: One-Sided Violence in Exemplary Conflicts

A: Azerbaijan

B: Sudan (without Darfur)

Figure 2: One-Sided Violence by Actor Group in Exemplary Conflicts

A: Darfur

B: Bosnia with Actor Groups (mode of reported victims)