Update Alert No. 12
18 December, 2012

New data releases

New version of the UCDP Geo-referenced Event Dataset

On 15 November, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program released a new version (1.5) of its Geo-referenced Event Dataset (UCDP GED). The dataset contains over 24.000 individual geo-referenced events of organised violence, disaggregated both temporally (down to the level of day) and spatially (down to the level of individual villages).

In comparison to the previous versions, this dataset has a wider scope, including inactive years for all UCDP actors and dyads, i.e. events in years where a conflict actor or dyad did not exceed the 25 deaths threshold typically used by UCDP.

Like the previous version, this dataset covers the entirety of Africa for the 1989-2010 period, and is available in various formats (CSV, Shapefile, Excel, database dumps for Postgres and MySQL databases) on the UCDP GED website at http://ucdp.uu.se/ged/.

Updated version of the UCDP Peace Agreement Dataset

UCDP is now releasing an updated version of the UCDP Peace Agreement Dataset. The dataset has been expanded to include 20 new years of peace making and now covers 1975-2011. The dataset is compatible with the UCDP Dyadic Dataset v. 1-2012, and the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset v.4-2012. It has been constructed to allow researchers to analyse the different peace agreements. The unit of analysis is the peace agreement; consequently more than one agreement can be registered for one conflict- or dyad-year in the UCDP data. Each agreement is now attributed with conflict, dyad and actor IDs from the other UCDP data to enhance the merging of different UCDP data collections.

The UCDP Peace Agreement dataset includes 216 peace agreements in 60 conflicts. For these agreements, different types, terms and terminations have been coded.

The primary sources of information for coding terms in the peace agreements have been copies of the agreements in full text. A new feature of the dataset is direct links to the different texts of the peace agreements stored in the UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia.

Updated UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia iPhone and Android applications

The UCDP Conflict Encyclopedia iPhone and Android applications have now been updated with information on conflicts, battle-related deaths, third party activities, negotiations and peace agreements for 2011.

The application can be downloaded, for free, from Apple's iTunes store and from Google Play.

Publications

States in Armed Conflict 2011

The 24th edition of the annual report of States in Armed Conflict will be released on 20 December. The report contains three parts, focusing on UCDP’s three categories of organised violence. Besides listing conflicts in the three categories, the report includes UCDP’s 2012 article in Journal of Peace Research and a chapter presenting the updated UCDP Peace Agreement Dataset 1975-2011.

New book uses UCDP data

The new book by Associate Professor Isak Svensson, Ending Holy Wars: Religion and Conflict Resolution in Civil Wars (University of Queensland Press, 2012) explores how religious dimensions affect the possibilities for conflict resolution in civil war. It draws upon empirical work on global data, based on the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), and complements this quantitative data with several smaller case studies from East Asia and elsewhere. In Ending Holy Wars, Dr Svensson addresses a timely question: How should we resolve conflicts with religious dimensions?

Ongoing projects

UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (UCDP GED)

The first version of the UCDP GED, which contains a subset including the entirety of Africa, was released in December 2011. The UCDP GED Conflict Polygons Dataset was released a few months later, in March 2012. Currently, UCDP is working on producing the next subset; Asia. The data is scheduled for release next year.