Last September, former Strauss Center Student Fellow Sarah Kaiser-Cross delivered a presentation on the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) at the Department of Defense Minerva Conference. Her presentation provided an overview of the ACLED project, a publicly available geo-referenced dataset on political violence. ACLED is supported by Minerva project funding through the Strauss Center’s CCAPS program, as well as by a European Research Commission grant.

The dataset covers 11 countries in South and South East Asia, and is updated monthly. In addition to the data, ACLED produces quarterly Trend Reports, country profiles, and topic-specific maps. Each act of political violence, defined as violence with a political goal, is coded as a discrete event and broken down by violence type (violence against civilians, battles between armed groups, riots, etc.), actor name, and actor type (rebels, state forces, militias, etc.).

The ACLED dataset captures the locations of violence, demonstrating that countries with multiple types of violence tend to have low rates of spatial overlap between different conflict types. It also captures the dynamics of violence, tracking violence over time as it escalates or decreases, suggesting evidence for changing actors’ relationships and goals. It can also be used to compare actor behavior, both over space and time.

The slides can be found here.