Science4Peace

Conflict Event Trends

The monthly ACLED trend monitoring reports provide a top ten ranking of countries based on quantitative data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). The aim is to identify countries with increasing trends in political instability and violence over the past few months.

The Conflict Event Trends page displays this quantitative data in an interactive way, allowing users to view rankings for different regions and country groupings. The view the page, click here. For a user manual of how to explore and navigate the Conflict Event Trends page, visit the Help section of the Science4Peace Portal.

Data and methodology

The monthly rankings rely on data from the Armed Conflict Location Event Data Project (ACLED), which tracks conflict and protest events globally. The data is collected by a team of trained field experts who rely primarily on news reports (for more information on ACLED’s data collection and sources, see this note). Although ACLED provides comprehensive data, it may not always capture all relevant events, especially in areas with limited news coverage. On the Conflict Event Trends page, countries are categorized based on to the following criteria, and rankings can be displayed for each combination of categories:

      • Event types:
        1. Battles
        2. Explosions/Remote violence
        3. Violence against civilians
        4. Riots
        5. Protests
      • Trend measures:
        1. The total number of events in the most recent monthly interval.
        2. The difference in the number of events in the most recent compared to the previous monthly interval.
        3. The difference in the number of events in the most recent monthly interval compared to the monthly average in the previous year.
        4. The percentage change in the number of events in the most recent compared to the previous monthly interval.
        5. The percentage change in the number of events in the most recent monthly interval compared to the monthly average in the previous year.
        6. The overall ranking using the average (geometric mean) of all of the previous rankings.