I'd particularly appreciate a reliable source for this one, because for now my website is only up-to-date because I read the news, which is a pretty unreliable way to do it. I have data about which countries recognize which others thanks to the wikipedia page on the matter, and the pages of the individual countries and their recognition status. For this one I decided to omit the "colonizers of the country for a relatively short period of time or with only low involvement in the governance of the colonized country". I have colonial relationships (which countries have been colonies of which others) thanks to the GeoDist dataset by CEPII. For these relations, I made the choice to omit borders between two countries when an unrecognized state controls the territory along that border (for example, in my data, Somalia and Djibouti do not share a border because Somaliland stands between them).
I've fixed the mistakes when I found them, but my data may still be dirty. However, it seems to have been unmaintained for a while, and contains a few inaccuracies (such as saying Kuwait borders Iran and not Iraq). I can tell whether country_a and country_b share a border thanks to this dataset. As it happens, this list mostly agrees with the "204 de facto sovereign states" described in Political Geography Now, with the addition of Niue and the Cook Islands. My list of countries comes from wikipedia's list of sovereign states. I am basically looking for a source of truth to which I can point to for any bias or choice made.įor now, I have used a couple of datasets: Ideally, I want to have to make the fewest decisions possible (which is not always possible, because of blurry definitions usually): I do not want to make any "editorial choices".
Better datasets than the ones I already use are also welcome. I'm looking for new datasets to expand the set of basic relations I can show when checking the relations between two countries. I'm still working on the basic relations, by which I mean the ones that do not change very often and that can be found in published datasets. I'm currently working on a tool (still very crude, not ready to show) to view at a glance the international relations between two countries.
#GEODIST TWO DATASETS FREE#
Feel free to let me know if that's the case! TL DR: what datasets have you used or would you use when working on an analysis?ĭisclaimer: I am very new to geopolitics and international relations, and it is completely unrelated to my day job, so I may make assumptions that are wrong.