Source description last updated: 29 September 2020

In brief: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) collects, analyses and maps information on crisis and conflict in Africa, South & Southeast Asia and the Middle East and provides datasets on conflict-related incidents.

Coverage on ecoi.net:

Reports, analyses, maps, Conflict Trend Reports

Covered monthly on ecoi.net, for countries of priorities A, B and C.

Mission/Mandate/Objectives:

“The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) is a disaggregated data collection, analysis, and crisis mapping project. ACLED collects the dates, actors, locations, fatalities, and types of all reported political violence and protest events […]. The ACLED team conducts analysis to describe, explore, and test conflict scenarios, and makes both data and analysis open for free use by the public. […]

“ACLED is a registered non-profit organization […] in the United States.” (ACLED website: About ACLED, undated)

Funding:

“ACLED receives financial support from the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the United States Department of State, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the German Federal Foreign Office, the Tableau Foundation, the International Organization for Migration, and The University of Texas at Austin.” (ACLED website: About ACLED, undated)

Scope of reporting:

Geographic focus: Africa, East, South and Southeast Asia, Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, Latin America and the Caribbean, Southeastern and Eastern Europe and the Balkans

Thematic focus: political violence (instances of use of force by a group with a political purpose or motivation); demonstrations (riots and protests); select non-violent, politically important events

Methodology:

„ACLED data are coded by a range of experienced researchers who collect information primarily from secondary source information and apply the guidelines outlined in the codebook to extract information from news reports. ACLED data are collected each week after individual researchers have scrutinized the information from reports; they are then aggregated and revised by the first coding reviewer, investigated and cross-checked by the second reviewer and then event notes and details are inspected by the third and final reviewer. […] Every event is coded using the same rules on who, what, where, and when, to maximize comparability and validity […]. […] ACLED collects and processes information by date, location, agent and event type. […] Further, we aim to capture how disorder occurs within states, so events are included regardless of whether they generate fatalities or not.” (ACLED: ACLED Methodology, December 2017, S. 1)

“ACLED collects information from a variety of primary and secondary sources. […] Coders use local, state, and international media sources, plus private reports, to capture events ranging from protests to battles. Overall, ACLED sources material in three ways: (1) information from local, regional, national and continental media is reviewed daily; (2) NGO reports are used to supplement media reporting in hard to access cases; (3) regionally focused news reports and analyses are integrated to supplement daily media reporting. […] Every ACLED event is composed from at least one source. The name, acronym, and/or website are noted in the source column.”  (ACLED: Sourcing, December 2017)

“There are up to six different types of spatial information recorded for each ACLED event”, including “the country in which the event occurred […]; […] the name of the first, second and third level administrative zones […]; […] the name of the specific location of an event; […] the geographic coordinates of that specific location; and […] a spatial precision code.”

As ACLED further explains, “[t]he most specific location for an event is sought for each ACLED code, using multiple sources to triangulate better location information”. This information may denote a city district, town, region, or province, depending on the information available. “No ACLED event is associated with the ‘country’ as the smallest location unit available.” (ACLED: ACLED Codebook, 2019, pp. 27–28)

Apart from this general methodology, ACLED employs context-specific methodologies, which are described here: https://acleddata.com/resources/methodology/

Language of publication:

English

Further reading / links:

Raleigh, Clionadh; Linke, Andrew; Hegre, Håvard; Karlsen, Joakim. "Introducing ACLED: An Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset", in: Journal of Peace Research (47(5) 2010 ), pp. 651–660
https://www.prio.org/Global/upload/CSCW/Data/UCSD_paper_final.pdf

Eck, Kristine: In data we trust? A comparison of UCDP GED and ACLED conflict events datasets, in: Cooperation and Conflict Vol. 47, Issue 1, 2012
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0010836711434463?journalCode=caca#articleCitationDownloadContainer

Raleigh, Clionadh; Kishi, Roudabeh; Russell, Olivia; Siegle, Joseph & Williams, Wendy: Boko Haram vs. al-Shabab: What do we know about their patterns of violence?, in: Washington Post, 2 October 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/02/boko-haram-vs-al-shabaab-what-do-we-know-about-their-patterns-of-violence/

 

All links accessed 29 September 2020.