Conflict Location and Trends Monitor#
Data Description#
Armed Conflict Location Event Database#
The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) is a disaggregated data collection, analysis, and crisis mapping project. ACLED collects information on the dates, actors, locations, fatalities, and types of all reported political violence and protest events around the world. ACLED data are derived from a wide range of local, national, and international sources in over 75 languages. The information is collected by trained researchers worldwide and coded weekly. During weekly coding, ACLED researchers find that many events are reported several times by multiple sources. The details of each report may differ, but ACLED researchers only extract factual information about the event: who was involved, where did it happen, when did it occur, what occurred, and in what sequence.
The sources that are used to identify these conflict events are traditional media, reports, local partner data and new media such as Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram. They do not scrape data from social media but use a targeted approach to the inclusion of new media through either the establishment of relationships with the source directly or the verification of the quality of each source. Additional details on their sourcing methodology can be found here.
Every ACLED event is based on at least one source. The source names or acronyms are noted in the ‘Source’ column. With the exception of certain local sources that wish to remain anonymous, the ‘Source’ column details are sufficient to retrace the sources that have been used to record an event. All sources listed have contributed information to the event. Researchers often find multiple reports confirming details about an event; when multiple sources report on the same information, the most thorough, reliable, and recent report is cited. The ACLED team corrects some of their past entries as they get new information about the reported conflict.
Data Access#
Dataset: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data
Dataset Provider: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project
Frequency: Daily
Granularity: Point location of the reported conflict
License: Accessing ACLED data requires abiding by their Terms of Use.
Data Access: Access to this data is via a contract between the World bank and ACLED and can be extracted by any World Bank employee upon registering for an API key. For assistance, please write to datalab@worldbank.org