Introducing the Human Rights Violations Dataset for the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey, 1990–2018

Abstract This study introduces a new event dataset on the human rights violations in the Kurdish conflict in Turkey perpetrated by both the State and the armed rebel group, the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers Party), from 1990 to 2018. The dataset codes human rights violation events that victimize civilians, including women and children, identifying the perpetrator, type of victim, type of human right violation, and the place of the violation. The categories of human rights violations include the physical and political rights drawn from the laws and treaties adopted by the U.N., such as killings or deaths of civilians, illegal detention and arrests, and freedom of peaceful assembly. The dataset is useful in examining the trends and motives of perpetrators in committing these violations and for seeking to understand the extent to which state and non-state rebel groups abide by international norms in armed conflicts. The framework of this dataset, although developed for the Kurdish conflict, is applicable and can be extended to other armed conflict cases, facilitating cross-conflict research on a more comparative basis.