contentiousR: an R package for contentious politics and civil conflict research

Abstract

This article introduces contentiousR — an R package that provides various tools and datasets for contentious politics and civil conflict research. It provides a flexible workflow for creating state panels and enriching them with socioeconomic, political, and conflict indicators — using either Correlates of War (COW) or Gleditsch-Ward (GW) country coding schemes. The package bundles ten preprocessed conflict and campaign event datasets, provides a pipeline workflow to conveniently add covariates, enables harmonizing external conflict event data sources, offers diagnostic tools to visualize their regional and temporal coverage, and supports interoperability with {peacesciencer}, another prominent R package in the subfield of peace science. The package's usage is illustrated with an example modeling revolutionary onset and comparing datasets of revolutionary events. The package maintains a website on GitHub: https://rguseinov.github.io/contentiousR/