Starting in May 2014, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) Project will release weekly updates of its real-time data on armed conflict in 30 high-risk African countries. On Monday afternoons, the Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program will post the updated conflict data for download via the CCAPS ACLED page and the CCAPS mapping tool.
The ACLED team will continue to release data for all of Africa on a monthly basis. As of May 3, 2014, ACLED researchers have recorded over 85,000 individual events, ranging from violent political unrest in Mali to battles between non-state actors in Sudan. The new addition of weekly data updates will allow researchers, practitioners, and the public to access a comprehensive list of the most up-to-date information on armed conflict events throughout Africa.
CCAPS researcher Clionadh Raleigh of the University of Sussex leads the ACLED Project, which tracks the actions of opposition groups, governments, and militias across Africa, specifying the exact location and date of battle events, transfers of military control, headquarter establishment, civilian violence, and rioting.
ACLED includes data from 1997 to 2014, with real-time conflict data updated monthly for all of Africa and weekly for 30 high-risk states. Data are disaggregated by type of violence including battles between armed actors, violence against civilians, and rioting and a wide variety of actors including government forces, rebel groups, militias, and civilians. All data are date-specific and geo-referenced to the town level. ACLED's disaggregation of civil war and transnational violent events allows analysis of the local factors that drive instability in Africa.
ACLED provides the tools for analysts to explore which regimes are most dangerous in Africa, who are the most active conflict groups on the continent, where are civilians most at risk, what types of violence are most prevalent, and where violent social upheaval, such as rioting, is on the increase.
The full ACLED dataset is available for download here.