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Scholars for a long time theorized about the role of political leaders, but empirical research has been limited by the lack of systematic data about individual leaders. Archigos is a new dataset with information on leaders in 188 countries from 1875 to 2004. We provide an overview of the main features of this data. Archigos specifically identifies the effective leaders of each independent state; it codes when and how leaders came into power, their age, and their gender, as well as their personal fate one year after they lost office. We illustrate the utility of the Archigos dataset by demonstrating how leader attributes predict other features of interest in International Relations and Comparative Politics. Crisis interactions differ depending on whether leaders face each other for the first time or have had prior interactions. Irregular leader changes can help identify political change in autocracies not apparent from data that consider only the democratic nature of institutions. Finally, transitions to democracy in the third wave are more likely to fail in instances where autocratic rulers were punished after leaving office. Our examples illustrate new empirical findings that simply could not be explored in existing data sources. Although selective, our overview demonstrates how Archigos bears considerable promise in providing answers to new and old research questions and opens up new avenues for research on individual leaders as decisionmakers.

Certain regions of the world experience more conflict than others+ Previous analyses have shown that a civil war in one country significantly increases the likelihood that neighboring states will experience conflict+ This finding, however, still remains largely unexplained+ We argue that population movements are an important mechanism by which conflict spreads across regions+ Refugee flows are not only the consequence of political turmoil-the presence of refugees and displaced populations can also increase the risk of subsequent conflict in host and origin countries+ Refugees expand rebel social networks and constitute a negative externality of civil war+ Although the vast majority of refugees never directly engage in violence, refugee flows may facilitate the transnational spread of arms, combatants, and ideologies conducive to conflict; they alter the ethnic composition of the state; and they can exacerbate economic competition+ We conduct an empirical analysis of the link between refugees and civil conflict since the mid-twentieth century, and we find that the presence of refugees from neighboring countries leads to an increased probability of violence, suggesting that refugees are one important source of conflict diffusion+ Certain regions of the world experience more conflict than others+ Regions such as Central America, the Great Lakes region of Africa, and SouthEast Asia have witnessed numerous civil wars within several states, whereas other areas such as Europe and the Southern Cone of Latin America have had a relatively low frequency of internal conflict+ Statistical analyses, moreover, have demonstrated that there is a regional clustering of civil war and that states bordering countries at war