As of December 2024, the Palestinian Territories were ranked as the most conflict-intense in the world, with over 80 percent of its population exposed to conflict. Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza following the terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023 has led to over 50,000 fatalities. Myanmar, ravaged by a civil war since 2021, and Ukraine, at war with Russia following the invasion in 2022, followed behind.

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) is a US-registered non-profit whose mission is to provide the highest quality real-time data on political violence and demonstrations globally. The information collected includes the type of event, its date, the location, the actors involved, a brief narrative summary, and any reported fatalities. ACLED users rely on our robust global dataset to support decision-making around policy and programming, accurately analyze political and country risk, support operational security planning, and improve supply chain management.ACLED’s transparent methodology, expert team composed of 250 individuals speaking more than 70 languages, real-time coding system, and weekly update schedule are unrivaled in the field of data collection on conflict and disorder. Global Coverage: We track political violence, demonstrations, and strategic developments around the world, covering more than 240 countries and territories.Published Weekly: Our data are collected in real time and published weekly. It is the only dataset of its kind to provide such a high update frequency, with peer datasets most often updating monthly or yearly.Historical Data: Our dataset contains at least two full years of data for all countries and territories, with more extensive coverage available for multiple regions.Experienced Researchers: Our data are coded by experienced researchers with local, country, and regional expertise and language skills.Thorough Data Collection and Sourcing: Pulling from traditional media, reports, local partner data, and verified new media, ACLED uses a tailor-made sourcing methodology for individual regions/countries.Extensive Review Process: Our data go through an exhaustive multi-stage quality assurance process to ensure their accuracy and reliability. This process includes both manual and automated error checking and contextual review.Clean, Standardized, and Validated: Our data can be easily connected with internal dashboards through our API or downloaded through the Data Export Tool on our website.Resources Available on ESRI’s Living AtlasACLED data are available through the Living Atlas for the most recent 12 month period. The data are mapped to the centroid of first administrative divisions (“admin1”) within countries (e.g., states, districts, provinces) and aggregated by month. Variables in the data include:The number of events per admin1-month, disaggregated by event type (protests, riots, battles, violence against civilians, explosions/remote violence, and strategic developments)A conservative estimate of reported fatalities per admin1-monthThe total number of distinct violent actors active in the corresponding admin1 for each monthThis Living Atlas item is a Web Map, which provides a pre-configured view of ACLED event data in a few layers:ACLED Event Counts layer: events per admin1-month, styled by predominant event type for each location.ACLED Violent Actors layer: the number of distinct violent actors per admin1-month.ACLED Fatality Estimates layer: the estimated number of fatalities from political violence per admin1-month.These layers are based on the ACLED Conflict and Demonstrations Event Data Feature Layer, which has the same data but only a basic default styling that is similar to the Event Counts layer. The Web Map layers are configured with a time-slider component to account for the multiple months of data per admin1 unit. These indicators are also available in the ACLED Conflict and Demonstrations Data Key Indicators Group Layer, which includes the same preconfigured layers but without the time-slider component or background layers.Resources Available on the ACLED WebsiteThe fully disaggregated dataset is available for download on ACLED's website including:Date (day, month, year)Actors, associated actors, and actor typesLocation information (ADMIN1, ADMIN2, ADMIN3, location and geo coordinates)A conservative fatality estimateDisorder type, event types, and sub-event typesTags further categorizing the data A notes column providing a narrative of the event For more information, please see the ACLED Codebook.To explore ACLED’s full dataset, please register on the ACLED Access Portal, following the instructions available in this Access Guide. Upon registration, you’ll receive access to ACLED data on a limited basis. Commercial users have access to 3 free data downloads company-wide with access to up to one year of historical data. Public sector users have access to 6 downloads of up to three years of historical data organization-wide. To explore options for extended access, please reach out to our Access Team (access@acleddata.com).With an ACLED license, users can also leverage ACLED’s interactive Global Dashboard and check in for weekly data updates and analysis tracking key political violence and protest trends around the world. ACLED also has several analytical tools available such as our Early Warning Dashboard, Conflict Alert System (CAST), and Conflict Index Dashboard.

This dataset contains the ACLED conflict index, its classification, and related underlying dimensions and rankings of deadliness, danger, diffusion, and fragmentation for the 279 second-level administrative areas of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad between 2018 and 2023. Following a slightly modified version of ACLED's conflict index methodology, the dataset is generated based on ACLED’s curated dataset for Africa (5 January 2024) and United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs's (OCHA) geographic dataset for the Sahel (including P-codes).

This description outlines the dataset associated with the research paper "Discovering the Mesoscale for Chains of Conflict," published in PNAS Nexus (click here to view the article). Please cite this paper if you use our dataset.

The dataset is divided into two main folders:

"voronoi_grids": This folder contains 100 realizations of Voronoi tessellations over the African continent. These tessellations were generated during the research process detailed in the aforementioned paper.

"avalanches": The "avalanches" folder comprises conflict avalanches derived from each of the realizations of the Voronoi tessellations. These avalanches were generated using the technique described in the research paper.

Reading avalanches from the pickle files:

The avalanches are stored in pickle files, and the following Python code can be used to read them:

import dill as pickle

Temporal scale. Choose one of the following values: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512

time = 32

Spatial scale. Choose one of the following values: 20, 28, 40, 57, 80, 113, 160, 226, 320, 453, 640, 905, 1280

dx = 453

Voronoi grid index. Choose from 0 to 99

gridix = 3

file_path = f"avalanches/battles/gridix_{gridix}/te/te_ava_{str(time)}_{str(dx)}.p" with open(file_path, "rb") as f: ava = pickle.load(f)

ava_event = ava["ava_event"]

The extracted avalanches are in "event form," represented as a list of lists, where each element corresponds to the index of an individual conflict event in the ACLED dataset. Each sublist represents an avalanche. The total number of avalanches at the given temporal and spatial scale can be determined by the length of ava_event (len(ava_event)).

ACLED Dataset:

Due to copyright issues, we are providing a filtered version of the ACLED dataset that we used in our study. To obtain the full version of the ACLED dataset containing all the information regarding each conflict event, please refer to the final bullet point of the manual installation instructions of our python pacakge arcolanche.