People on War 1999 was an International Committee of the Red Cross worldwide consultation on the rules of war conducted by Greenberg Research, Inc. for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The People on War project is "a worldwide consultation of common people. Civilians and combattants alike will be asked, how they view their experience in war, what basic rules they expect to apply in war, why these rules sometimes break down and what their expectations for the future are." (People on War Project mission statement, December 15, 1988)
Survey interviews with civilians and combatants in 12 countries that were either experiencing situations of armed conflict or armed violence or suffering the aftermath and 5 other countries. Surveys were conducted in 1999 by local partners and were part of a larger research program including focus group interviews and in-depth face-to-face interviews.
This guide presents the study's documentation and microdata datasets for the individual country surveys. The documentation and datasets were obtained from SIDOS, the Swiss data archive.
Two subsequent ICRC consultations were conducted to update People on War:
Microdata datasets for these later studies are archived at FORS, the Swiss data archive.
The People on War global report and other overview materials have been compressed into PKZIP-format archive files:
The ICRC website provides downloadable copies of the Global Report, the Parallel report (local-partner surveys were conducted in Colombia, Philippines, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the ICRC also had conducted a national consultation and survey, to identify bias in the ICRC consultation and survey.), and country-level reports:
Countries were selected using these criteria: geography (global reach); type of conflict (international conflicts and civil wars, territorial, ethnic and ideological types of armed conflicts); and time period (Cold War and post-Cold War). This list of countries was then evaluated against political and security considerations to determine the feasibility of conducting the consultation in that country.
Each country's data sets, documentation, and report literature have been compressed into a single PKZIP-format archive file. Typically, this archive contains the following directory structure:
National public opinion surveys were conducted in four of the five permanent member countries of the United Nations Security Council to see how the publics in these superpower countries view war and, despite its changing character, the prospects of preserving the concept of limits in war. A survey was also undertaken in Switzerland.
