Paul Soltys
There has been a huge quantity of media focus on the most active conflicts currently in the world, particularly in Ukraine and in the Middle East. However, violence continues to persist in other lower-level conflicts and regions with significant unrest. The goal of this project is to look more closely at the status of these other areas with significant violence, and their consequences on people.
Violence and conflict have very significant global impacts- in particular, mass exodus by people from violent areas has massive geopolitical impacts, whether it is Central Americans fleeing to North American or targeted ethnic minorities fleeing from Sudan or Myanmar.Highlighting other areas that are potentially at risk, and comparing the level of impact to the more active conflicts that get most of the media coverage. In particular, ACLED's information the people impacted by events is information that should be able to add an extra level of depth to the geographic analysis.
Data Source: ACLED
The data itself is violent events data from ACLED, specifically from 2023. It's an events-based database, with geographic and time-stamped events that have a solid number of additional tags for sorting/ordering, as well as additional analysis based on the actors involved, populations impacted, and more. There are a few unusual taggings, particularly peaceful protests and other demonstrations, but those are easily filtered as the dataset is very well curated.
The full year's download has ~330k events/rows, and 30 columns to work with including lat/log, geographic groupings, and timestamps.