Over the last decade, there has been a growing literature problematizing the growing availability and use cases of quantitative data on armed conflict. While this literature can generally be distinguished in two opposite strands, the ‘data pessimists’ and the ‘data optimists’, empirical analysis of actual research practices and practitioners uses related to such data has mostly been limited to single case studies, neglecting potential differences across practitioner fields and/or countries. On this background, the DATAWAR project has studied the interactions between scholarly and applied uses of conflict data, using a comparative approach that looks at different components in the lifecycle of data, from their collection and scholarly analysis to perceptions and uses by actors involved in international crisis management, including military organizations, humanitarian organizations, foreign ministries, and the media. The DATAWAR project has been built on the hypothesis that scientific output in quantitative conflict studies is driven less by theoretical innovation than by the ‘politics of data’: the availability, reputation, and mathematical malleability of numerical observations of conflict. We anticipate that the perceptions of conflict developed by practitioners who employ quantitative methods and sources are prone to distortion as a result of the nature of the available data, the type of mathematical models used to analyze and potentially ‘predict’ conflict, and reliance on a selective subset of theoretical approaches.