The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) is the world’s main provider of data on organized violence and the oldest ongoing data collection project for civil war, with a history of almost 40 years. Its definition of armed conflict has become the global standard of how conflicts are systematically defined and studied. UCDP produces high-quality data, which are systematically collected, have global coverage, are comparable across cases and countries, and have long time series which are updated annually. Furthermore, the program is a unique source of information for practitioners and policymakers.
UCDP data is suitable for both micro and macro level analysis, as well as for qualitative research. UCDP data covers, for example: civil wars, communal violence, armed groups, violence against civilians and violence between rebel groups. The data is regularly updated and manually curated to ensure quality and consistency.
The Violence & Impacts Early-Warning System (VIEWS) is a research collaboration between Uppsala University and Peace Research Institute Oslo that brings together the political Violence Early-Warning System (VIEWS) with the interdisciplinary conflict impacts projects Societies at Risk and ANTICIPATE.
The system offers a novel integration of isolated causal factors – identified through decades of peace research – into a theoretically and methodologically consistent forecasting system that is further informed by conflict data spanning nearly 30 years in time. VIEWS systematically monitors all locations at risk and produces uniform predictions of the number of fatalities in impending state-based conflict (soon to be accompanied by predictions for armed conflict between non-state actors, and violence against civilians).
The following section provides an overview of the data sources provided by UCDP/VIEWS and how they are prepared and included in Demscore.
UCDP’s main dataset is the Georeferenced Events Dataset. The unit of analysis in the UCDP GED is the ‘event’ – “An incident where armed force was used by an organised actor against another organized actor, or against civilians, resulting in at least 1 direct death at a specific location and a specific date”. The dataset covers UCDP's three main categories of violence: state-based armed conflict (Gleditsch et al., 2002), non-state conflict (Sundberg, Eck & Kreutz, 2012) and one-sided violence (Eck & Hultman, 2007).
The data contained within the UCDP GED are those events of organized violence that, in their aggregated form, constitute the UCDP’s country-year datasets on (1) state-based armed conflict (Gleditsch et al., 2002), (2) non-state conflict (Sundberg, Eck & Kreutz, 2012), and (3) one-sided violence (Eck & Hultman, 2007). The UCDP GED thus contains information on three types of organized violence: violence between two organized actors of which at least one is the government of a state, violence between actors of which neither party is the government of a state, and lastly, violence against unarmed civilians perpetrated by organized non-state groups or governments. The UCDP GED contains each building block of the corresponding aggregated country and conflict-year datasets in the form of its constituent events. In order for an instance of violence to qualify for inclusion, the circumstances must not only live up to the previously listed definition of an event, but must also fulfil the definitional criteria of a specified type of violence (for instance, for state-based conflict two parties must dispute an incompatibility).
The UCDP GED dataset is available in Demscore both in its initial shape at the event-level, as well as aggregated to a country-year level aggregated on the geographic country location of the fighting. All UCDP country data are based on the Gleditsch and Ward list of independent states.
VIEWS is an ambitious early-warning system at the frontier of research on conflict forecasting.
The open-source tool is continuously developed, tested and iteratively improved, resulting in frequent releases of new models and versions thereof. The forecasts are among others based on the monthly published UCDP Candidate Events Datasets and provide continuous predictions of the number of fatalities in impending conflict, and probabilistic dichotomous (conflict/no conflict) forecasts based on the former.
VIEWS forecasts are presented at two levels of analysis, the country-month level and sub-national PRIO-GRID-month level.
The country-month level uses the calendar month as the temporal unit of analysis and countries as the spatial unit. The set of countries is derived from the Gleditsch & Ward (1999) list of independent states, while their geographic extent (and country IDs) are determined by the GIS dataset CShapes v.0.6 ( Weidmann, Kuse & Gleditsch, 2010).
The PRIO-GRID-month (pgm) level uses calendar months as the temporal units of analysis, and spatial units derived from PRIO-GRID 2.0 ( Tollefsen, Strand & Buhaug, 2012). The latter is a standardized spatial grid structure consisting of quadratic grid cells that jointly cover all areas of the world at a resolution of 0.5 x 0.5 decimal degrees, approximately 55×55 km around the equator.
The current model is known as the fatalities model. For each month in a 3-year forecasting window, it generates predictions for the number of fatalities in impending conflict, as well as dichotomous forecasts for the probability of at least 25 battle-related deaths (BRDs) per country-month and at least 1 BRD per PRIO-GRID-month.
Changes to the fatalities model over time are documented in our version-tagged source code on GitHub, where the complete model documentation is accompanied by a written model changelog.
Detailed information on the VIEWS forecasting model can be found here
Variables from UCDP and VIEWS datasets in Demscore are available in their original form in the datasets’ respective Output Units. The figure below shows all Output Units we identified for UCDP/VIEWS and which datasets belong to each.
NOTE: Not all datasets within UCDP/VIEWS can be translated to each other. This has different reasons; VIEWS cannot be matched on the year identifier as it predicts the future, while UCDP (as well as other Modules) collect observations for the past and present. Within UCDP, some datasets are generated from each other or are already available in an aggregated form (e.g., the Battle-Related Deaths dataset at the conflict level is an aggregation of the Dyadic version). Hence, not all UCDP and VIEWS variables can be retrieved through all other Output Units within UCDP and VIEWS. The figure below is an overview of which variables can be retrieved in which other Output Units within this Module. The labelled arrows further indicate which aggregation methods we use and in what way observations are translated to each other.
Added are also translations between UCDP/VIEWS Output Units and Output Units from other Modules, which can be explored further in the Demscore Methodology Document.
You can find a detailed explanation of all Units and more information on their programmatic construction on the Documentation page and in the Demscore Methodology Document.
