The Quixotic Journey of Country Information and Data

During my Spring Break, I decided to reread some examples of classic literature, including my favorite one of all times, Don Quixote. Since I was a kid, I have always been obsessed with the scene on windmills and the “quixotic” battle that ensues. Don Quixote’s faithful companion, Sancho Panza puts an end to it with his insightful remark: Mire vuestra merced que aquellos que allí se parecen no son gigantes, sino molinos de viento (Look, your grace, that those appearing over there are not giants, but windmills).

In legal research, and in particular our community of Foreign, Comparative and International Legal (FCIL) Research, we have had several “windmill” moments over the past couple of decades. Personally, I think there are two major windmills in FCIL at the moment. First, we have the goldrush-like usage of AI tools offering a chimeric and effortless fix to a type of legal research which is nothing but. And then, you also have the ostentatious displays of voluntary ignorance of some governments in the West translated into removal of important online information and attacks on critical thinking.

More recently, we had the removal of an incredibly important free source of information, the CIA World Factbook. I believe it’s fair to say that the Factbook was widely used, not only by Americans, but also by people everywhere interested in reliable and trustworthy facts about countries and territories around the world. Several months ago, the database was unceremoniously removed without any reason or explanation given to anyone. As someone who has done this work for years, this action may be described as a celebration of wilful ignorance in close dialogue with so many other governments in the world which thrive in the blindness of its citizens. In the wise words of Don Quixote, El conocimiento es la mejor herramienta de que puede disponer el hombre (Knowledge is the best tool available to man).

Therefore, please allow me to show you three free sources which are great alternatives to this type of information as well as a research technique which may prove to be of importance. It’s all about resilience, my dear readers.

Our first stop is Our World in Data (OWID), the flagship project of the non-profit organization, Global Change Data Lab based in the UK and operating since 2013. From the homepage, you have three ways of navigating the richness of the information on their site: topics, data and insights. Personally, I prefer to start my research with which board topic I’m interested in and then navigate the data from there. OWID is organized in ten topics: Population and Democratic Change; Health; Energy and Environment; Food and Agriculture; Poverty and Economic Development; Education and Knowledge; Innovation and Technological Change; Living Conditions, Community and Wellbeing; Human Rights and Democracy; and Violence and War. Once you have selected the topic you are interested in, there are numerous sub-topics to choose from and it takes you to an intro page from where you can select data, charts and blog posts. The project is related to the University of Oxford. Therefore, their experts seem to be current and former academics with connections to the academic institution.

A newer free source alternative is OpenFactBook (OFB) which claims to be a “community-maintained successor to the CIA World Factbook”. True to the World Factbook format, OFB allows users to choose from a total of 254 places ranging from fully-independent and internationally recognized countries as well as territories from all over the world. Once you click on your place of interest, you will find data categories which we are all familiar with such as Geography, People & Society, Government, Economy and so on. A major improvement from the CIA Factbook is how OFB allows researchers to compare and rank countries and territories based on the available data for different categories. You can choose to build your comparison yourself from scratch or you can use one of the pre-formatted rankings in topics such as Life Expectancy, Unemployment Rate, Internet Users and others. I hope they are able to maintain and expand in the future.

When searching for primary data or expert analysis on different topics at an international level or for comparison purposes, another important research strategy to keep in mind is finding regional and/or international organizations that work on the area. These organizations do collect vast amounts of data and information including their member states as well as other countries/territories related to whichever topics they are interested in. Finding which international organizations cover completely or partially your topic of interest is not an easy task.The list of intergovernmental organizations maintained by Wikipedia is a great starting point, albeit with its limitations. For a more extensive list, the reputable and well-known Yearbook of International Organizations published by the Union of International Associations has its own free version called, Open Yearbook. Here you can sort by regions or topics and find both non-governmental organizations as well as intergovernmental organizations.

Lastly, I have the utmost confidence in the resilience of our FCIL community of researchers, librarians, professors and students that do this work every day. A few years ago, I began teaching students in my courses about the importance of visualizing themselves as resilient researchers able to face any challenge coming their way. That is how we have always succeeded in the past and this time, it will not be any different.