Chapter 3.3: Collecting Conflict Data Worldwide: ACLED’s Contribution

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) compiles and curates a dataset of individual political disorder events across the world. Its focus is on political violence and protest, and it monitors the activity of a variety of conflict actors and armed groups, as well as multiple forms of unrest. Unlike other datasets that use machine-led coding, ACLED relies on a researcher-led data collection process that allows for the incorporation of conflict and protest events from a wide range of sources, including local-language media, conflict observatories and other situation reports, which mitigates overreliance on international news agencies. This chapter provides an overview of ACLED’s contribution to the open source research community, discussing its methodology, coding and sourcing strategies in relation to other conflict datasets, using case study examples to explore and demonstrate ACLED’s unique approach.