Welcome to Will Moore's Minorities at Risk Homepage!

Note: Visit the official Minorities at Risk site at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland.

What is the Minorities at Risk Project?

The Minorities at Risk project was created by Ted Robert Gurr (University of Maryland) to enable scholars and policy makers to be able to systematically study and come to better understand the extent to which communal groups are "at risk" in today's world. For a project overview, please see:

Ted Robert Gurr. 1993. Minorities at Risk, Washington: United States Institute of Peace.

See also Professor Gurr's 1994 Presidential Address to the International Studies Association:

Ted Robert Gurr. 1994. "Peoples Against States," International Studies Quarterly, 38(3):347-377.

Two reports on trends in the 1990's are available here:

They are zipped WordPerfect for Windows (6.1) files.

Data Sets

The Minorities at Risk project has produced three data sets to help people study ethnic conflict behavior and patterns. The data are described briefly below.

Phase I

Phase I of the data is described in Gurr's (1993) book and a Codebook by Shin-wha Lee that comes with the data. The data consist of 261 demographic, grievance, behavior and other variables that are coded for 233 communal groups circa 1985.

An electronic copy of the data is available at the Minorities at Risk site at the University of Maryland.

I have used the Phase I data in 3 published studies:

1997 ``Ethnopolitical Rebellion: A Cross-sectional Analysis of the 1980s with Risk Assessments for the 1990s,'' Ted Robert Gurr and Will H. Moore, American Journal of Political Science, 41(4):1079-1103.
1997 ``Ethnicity Matters: Transnational Ethnic Alliances and Foreign Policy Behavior,'' David R. Davis and Will H. Moore, International Studies Quarterly, 41(1):171-184.
1995 ``Deprived, Rational or Both? `Why Minorities Rebel' Revisited,'' Ronny Lindström and Will H. Moore, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 23 (Winter):167-190.

This is the SPSS file that can be used to recode the Protest and Rebellion indicators as described in Gurr & Moore (1997).

This is the replication data set for Gurr & Moore (1997).

Phase II

This is a data set on genocides and politicides collected by Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr. It generates chronologies of several cases of genocide and politicide and also produces coded data on several of the variables described in:

Barbara Harff. 1994. "A Theoretical Model of Genocides and Politicides,"The Journal of Ethno-Development, 4(1):25-30.

For more information, please contact Professor Harff at: harff@arctic.nadn.navy.mil, or

Department of Political Science
United States Naval Academy
Annapolis, MD 21402
USA
301/267-3261 (voice)

Phase III

Phase III of the data was completed were deposited at the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR, University of Michigan). They are also available from the official Minorities at Risk site.

The data are similar to the Phase I data except that it is coded for 1990- 95 and there are many new groups coded. In addition, some new variables have been added and other have been dropped.

Questions for the Minorities at Risk project should be directed to: minpro@cidcm.umd.edu.

Last Updated on 23 May 2003 by Will H. Moore

I can be reached by email at whm@despammed.com.