ACLED Event Analysis

ACLED codes a broader set of events — including non-fatal violence, riots, and protests — and updates near-weekly with extensive actor detail, prioritizing breadth and timeliness. UCDP requires at least one fatality per event, applies conservative sourcing, and emphasizes long-run comparability. ACLED captures more low-level and contentious activity; UCDP is more conservative and historically deep. Many analysts use them for complementary purposes.

Because political disorder is a continuum: protests can escalate into riots and violence, and tracking the full spectrum of contentious politics lets analysts study escalation and de-escalation rather than only the violent endpoint. Researchers can always filter to violent or fatal event types, but the broader coding supports questions about mobilization and unrest that fatality-gated data cannot answer.

Coverage and sourcing have expanded as the project grew and added regions and partners, so apparent increases in events can reflect better data collection rather than more violence. Analysts must account for this — for example by restricting to consistently covered places and periods, modeling coverage explicitly, or focusing on within-unit changes — to avoid mistaking measurement expansion for real trends.