Political violence in Pakistan: Understanding subnational patterns

Political violence has long been endemic in Pakistan, but the scale, scope, and geographic distribution of the problem has not been systematically studied. On the policy side, decision makers lack credible quantitative data with which to weigh the relative costs of politically-motivated violence against the many other challenges facing Pakistan. On the academic side, scholars lack the ability to quantitatively assess the role of violence in Pakistani’s political and economic development. To remedy these gaps Shapiro and Rais developed incident-level data on political violence in Pakistan from 1988 to the present. These data include a range of details on 27, 555 incidents and are helping to: Identify broad patterns of violence across multiple actors and types of events for each district and province of Pakistan; Bring clarity to policy debates over who suffered which kinds of violence, where, and when.

The data can be downloaded from the dataverse as Stata do and dta files. Data files needed for replication are labeled by topic. Do file to prep data and to replicate tables. Descriptions of tables created and coding in the do file.