Military Ad Hoc Coalitions and Their Role in International Conflict Management: Insights from the ADHOCISM Dataset

Against the background of a crisis of United Nations (UN) peace operations, military ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) have increasingly gained a foothold as conflict management tools. This article provides the first comprehensive empirical mapping of military AHCs, focusing on the following questions: how have military AHCs evolved over time, where have they been deployed, who are the most active contributors, and how do AHCs interact and compare with other military conflict management initiatives? We do so by introducing and analysing an original dataset encompassing 58 different military AHCs since 1945. We map attributes of temporality, membership, organizational structure, geographical orientation and mandate, and show that military AHCs are not a new phenomenon, but that their composition and use have changed considerably over time. The ADHOCISM dataset makes comparative analysis possible among military AHCs, but also between them and other types of arrangements, such as UN peace operations or operations implemented by regional organizations. It offers much-needed data for scholars who wish to understand how the field of international conflict management is changing amidst a crisis of multilateralism and what role AHCs can perform in parallel with, or in replacement of UN peace operations.