ARMED CONFLICT LOCATION AND EVENT DATA (ACLED)

A SUB-NATIONAL CONFLICT RESEARCH AGENDA

Clionadh Raleigh

Trinity College Dublin

African conflict & hotspots

Armed Conflict Location and Event Data

Individual conflict events disaggregated by location, date, actor and conflict event type

Covers civil wars, communal violence, rioting and protesting

Events for 50 countries from 1997-2010Real time information collected for highly unstable states Publicly available online

Conflict Event Types Include:Violent (94.5%)

Battles (43%) Violence against civilians (36%) Riots/Protests (14.5%)

Non Violent Events (5.5%) Territorial transfers Headquarter establishment

(and other non-violent rebel activity)

Coverage Map

Sources

Includes information from the following local and regional news sources (and others): Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN)

Relief Web Factiva Lexis-Nexis BBC monitoring Africa Research Bulletin African Contemporary Record Africa Confidential

Why a focus on political violence?

Developing states are the sites of substantial, widespread political insecurity.

In states with civil wars, the proportion of violence accounted by formal rebel conflict is approximately 50% of the total violence.

Remaining violence includes actions by communal and political militias, rioters and protesting.

Lack of research into Civil versus Civic violence

Risks of Political Violence Across African States

Different Types of Violence

Rebel Forces: Formal type of oppostion violence involving battles with national militaries for the overthrow of a sitting government. Rebel actions are component parts of ‘civil wars’

Communal Militia: Local, often ethnic based, contests

Political Militia: Informal violence with groups self identifying, not professional soldiers Can be pro-government, rebel allies, political parties violent wings, urban quasi-criminal gangs)

Rioting/Protesting: spontaneous civilian oppositions actions against a political entity. Rioters use violence, protestors do not (although violence may be used on them)

Different types of Political Violence

Timeline

Why Disaggregate and Geo-reference Conflict Data?

National scale data is too coarse for key research questions Analyses at this resolution misconstrues political, economic, social, and

physical geographies

What does a spatial perspective add to our discussion of conflict patterns? Trends appear throughout time and also across space The practices of governments and insurgent groups are spatial inscribed

Are ‘locations’ important? Events do not take place in a socio-economic vacuum Conflicts are ‘situated’ in particular contexts e.g. civil war events take place in regions of political contest

New Patterns Derived From ACLEDCivil wars are generally fought on approximately 15% of a country

Accessible, populated areas are more likely to experience conflict than rural, under-populated areas

Different types of conflict (e.g. civil war, communal violence, rioting) affect different areas and populations

Poorest areas of a state are not more likely to rebel

Peace agreements create an impetus for civilian violence in frontlines zones

Timelines of Rebel Activity

Tracking Communal Violence

Depending on Population Profile, the Perpetrator of ‘Violence Against Civilians’ Change

Food Prices & Riots

Cross Border Events

Cross Border Continued

Real Time Analysis

Promises/Pitfalls

Potential Drawbacks Theoretical debates regarding ecological inferences (e.g. which scale is best for a research question)

Empirical debates (e.g. which observation unit is best for a research question)There are rarely independent variables at the same (fine) resolution

The reliability and coverage of media sources can be questionable in certain circumstances

Sub-national Research Agenda (I)There exists a hierarchy of explanations for conflicts

National research explains the different trajectories of conflict among states

Micro-level research is an interrogation of multiple actors, motivations and political cleavages across scales

Sub-national conflict research is the study of political processes as exhibited over space within a country/region and throughout time

The greater agenda of sub-national research is to understand how political institutions – the topography of governance – shape the potential for conflict...

(and)What kinds of conflict risk and observed conflict types are endogenous to groups and regions...

(and)What local and national triggers drive spatial and temporal trends of conflict

Sub-national Research Agenda (II)

Reliability

Number of eventsExternal validation

ACLED random samples Afghanistan comparison to Wikileaks

Groundtruthing Extensive, ongoing visits and interviews with local experts

Conclusions

Conflict types are endogenous to the position of ethno-regional groups in a state’s political heirarchy Civil Wars are largely interactions between politically relevant groups (either in or our of office, but more so out of office). Across states, they occur across poverty levels and polity level. Subnatioanlly, they occur in economically critical regions, and populated places within homelands of national (aggregate) groups.

Communal violence is largely a Sahel and East African phenomena and occurs in sparsely populated, poorer and politically irrelevant parts of a state (unless these groups are part of the dominatn power structure such is the case in Mali & Niger).

Militia violence occurs across all areas, but is mainly clustered in PR zones, in particular zones of powerful ethnic communites. This violence occurs across all income levels, with a substantial rate in wealtier states and (subnationally) wealthier parts of the states.It reflects a growing informality to political violence (e.g. Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ivory Coast)

Rioting and protesting follow similar patterns to militia behhavior

www.acleddata.com

Other Types of Conflict Event or Disaggregated Data

Patterns of Violence in West Africa