Abstract This article introduces the War-Related Protests (WRP) data, a cross-national dataset covering WRP events in Africa from 1990 to 2017. To better understand civilian agency during civil war, the WRP provides insight into the specific demands of demonstrators, the targets of those demands, and the actors who repress them. This provides insight into protester demands and civilian sentiment during times of war, allowing for a more nuanced assessment of both the causes and effects of civilian actions. This article presents the rationale for the project, the typology of wartime demands and collection procedures, a descriptive exploration of the data, and an illustrative example of how the data can be used, focusing on the size of protest events. Our data suggest that pro-peace goals are present in only about 14% of events, but that they are larger on average than other events and thus may have an outsized impact on a conflict’s trajectory.
Ryckman et al. (Tue,) studied this question.