Last updated 2023.04.26
This page was inspired by the excellent Conflict, Political Violence, and Peace Data page by Jeremy Darrington at Princeton University.
CSCW and Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, have collaborated in the production of a dataset of armed conflicts, both internal and external, in the period 1946 to the present. The Armed Conflict Dataset is primarily intended for academic use in statistical and macro-level research. It complements the annual compendium of ongoing armed conflicts published in the Journal of Peace Research, as well as the UCDP online database.
ACLED is the most comprehensive public collection of political violence data for developing states. This data and analysis project produces information on the specific dates and locations of political violence, the types of event, the groups involved, fatalities, and changes in territorial control. Information is recorded on the battles, killings, riots, and recruitment activities of rebels, governments, militias, armed groups, protesters and civilians. As of early 2015, ACLED has recorded over 100,000 individual events, with ongoing data collection focused on Africa and ten countries in South and Southeast Asia. The data can be used for medium- and long-term analysis and mapping of political violence across developing countries through use of historical data from 1997, as well as informing humanitarian and development work in crisis and conflict-affected contexts through realtime data updates and reports.
... a large-scale effort initiated by the Cline Center for Democracy as part of its Societal Infrastructures and Development (SID) project. Its objective is to ... [create] a set of time-varying measures that gauge the nature and depth of country-specific socio-cultural cleavages. It focuses on 165 of the largest countries in the world (all countries with a population above 500,000 in 2004) during the post-WWII era. The data-gathering phase has two main components. The first deals with the collection of population data for the principal ethnic and religious groups in a country; it uses these data to create a set of country-specific projections on the relative sizes of the different groups during the postwar era. The second component involves collecting survey data from country and regional experts on: (1) various physical, cultural and ascribed differences between the groups; and (2) country-specific factors that ameliorate/ aggravate inter-group differences (e.g., crosscutting organizational memberships; dyadic relationships within social, economic, legal and political domains that reflect power differentials).
COW seeks to facilitate the collection, dissemination, and use of accurate and reliable quantitative data in international relations. Key principles of the project include a commitment to standard scientific principles of replication, data reliability, documentation, review, and the transparency of data collection procedures. More specifically, we are committed to the free public release of data sets to the research community, to release data in a timely manner after data collection is completed, to provide version numbers for data set and replication tracking, to provide appropriate dataset documentation, and to attempt to update, document, and distribute follow-on versions of datasets where possible.
illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive," and successes as episodes in which the perpetrators control power for at least 7 days. This used to be a data set, some information of which is available here from the University of Kentucky. Data was updated in near-real time, so that a disclaimer was added such that any coded events that were ongoing were to be treated as tentative.
The Minorities at Risk (MAR) Project ... monitors and analyzes the status and conflicts of politically-active communal groups in all countries with a current population of at least 500,000. The project is designed to provide information in a standardized format that aids comparative research and contributes to the understanding of conflicts involving relevant groups ... The MAR project maintains data on 284 politically active ethnic groups. The centerpiece of the project is a dataset that tracks groups on political, economic, and cultural dimensions. The project also maintains analytic summaries of group histories, risk assessments, and group chronologies for each group in the dataset.
Drawing from archival UN records, the International Peace Institute Peacekeeping Database presents the first publicly available database of total uniformed personnel contributions of each contributing country by month, by type (troop, police, or expert/observer) and by mission, from November 1990 to present.
The RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents (RDWTI) is a compilation of data from 1968 through 2009. [providing] comprehensive information on international and domestic terrorism ... [with] over 40,000 incidents of terrorism coded and detailed ...
The Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST) maintains a searchable database on all suicide attacks from 1982 through August 2015. The database includes information about the location of attacks, the target type, the weapon used, and systematic information on the demographic and general biographical characteristics of suicide attackers. ... The current CPOST-SAD release contains the universe of suicide attacks from 1982 through August 2015, a total of 4,620 attacks in over 40 countries.
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) has recorded ongoing violent conflicts since the 1970s. The data provided is one of the most accurate and well-used data-sources on global armed conflicts and its definition of armed conflict is becoming a standard in how conflicts are systematically defined and studied. It offers a number of datasets on organised violence and peacemaking, covering the period 1946 to the present. Those who are interested in detailed data for specific conflicts in the period 1975-2014 should consult the UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia (UCDP database), which offers a graphic user interface, extensive descriptive information, and is continuously updated.
