This article introduces the Commercial Military Actor Database (CMAD), a dataset able to support research on civil war and commercial military actors. First, the CMAD covers all civil wars from 1980 to 2016 across all of the world’s regions except Europe, which enables the investigation of long-term regional and global trends. Second, the CMAD encompasses the corporate market segment and mercenary outfits, which facilitates the analysis of how those actors have impacted conflicts differently. Third, containing detailed information about the relationships behind exchanges, the CMAD allows users to disaggregate market exchanges. Using the CMAD’s new data, we examined trends in the market for force, and demonstrate the data’s added value. We re-examining Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski’s study on how private military and security companies affect the duration of civil war. The findings show that the market’s influence on conflict can only be fully understood by including corporate and mercenary actors.

本文介绍了商业军事行动者数据库 (CMAD)，这是一个能够支持内战和商业军事行动者研究的数据集。首先，CMAD 涵盖了 1980 年至 2016 年期间除欧洲以外的世界所有地区的所有内战，从而能够调查长期的地区和全球趋势。其次，CMAD 包含企业市场细分和雇佣军装备，这有助于分析这些行为者如何以不同方式影响冲突。第三，包含有关交易所背后关系的详细信息，CMAD 允许用户分解市场交易所。使用 CMAD 的新数据，我们检查了市场的力量趋势，并展示了数据的附加值。我们重新审视了 Akcinaroglu 和 Radziszewski 关于私营军事和安保公司如何影响内战持续时间的研究。调查结果表明，只有将企业和雇佣军参与者纳入其中，才能充分理解市场对冲突的影响。