About UCDP GED

Welcome!

The UCDP GED is an event-based and georeferenced dataset on organized violence, detailing all of the UCDP’s categories of violence (state-based conflict, non-state conflict and one-sided violence) in Africa between 1989 and 2010 at the level of the individual event of violence.

In contrast to the UCDP’s country-year datasets, that are separated between different datasets depending on the type of violence they track, the UCDP GED contains data on all types of organized violence, disaggregated spatially and temporally down to the level of the individual incidents of fatal violence. Each event comes complete with date of the event, place of the event (with coordinates), actors participating in the event, estimates of fatalities, as well as variables that denote the certainty with which these data are known.

This version of the dataset comes in a point format, georeferenced using the WGS84 datum and is compatible with most GIS software. Further updates during December 2011 and January 2012 will contain polygons of conflict zones, as well as onset data in point and polygon formats (shapefile format for use in ArcGIS and KML for use with Google solutions). This first release of data contains all of those events that appear in years when a dyad or actor crosses the 25 fatalities threshold; future updates will contain events beyond these so-called ‘active years’, as well as data on actors and dyads that have never crossed this threshold. This version of the dataset contains approximately 24 000 individual events of violence.

This new dataset allows for the analysis of the causes, dynamics and resolution of organized violence at a level of analysis below the state system. The data can be conjoined with other sub-state data, such as disaggregated information on population, economy and the environment to allow for types of analyses and answer questions that country-level cannot address.

The UCDP has been working on coding and organizing these data for approximately 2,5 years, with a research group of approximately 15 project managers and research assistants. The data have been thoroughly checked and double-checked, both manually and through automated scripts, so as to ensure the integrity and usability of the product. We hope you like it.

Questions, comments and any errors should be directed to the project manager, Ralph Sundberg (ralph.sundberg [at] pcr.uu.se).

A further description page of the project exists on the homepage of the Department of Peace and Conflict Research.