Introducing the UCDP Non-State Conflict Dataset

Abstract

This article extends the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) by presenting new global data on non-state conflict, or armed conflict between two groups, neither of which is the state. The dataset includes conflicts between rebel groups and other organized militias, and thus serves as a complement to existing datasets on armed conflict which have either ignored this kind of violence or aggregated it into civil war. The dataset also includes cases of fighting between supporters of different political parties as well as cases of communal conflict, that is, conflict between two social groups, usually identified along ethnic or religious lines. This thus extends UCDP's conflict data collection to facilitate the study of topics like rebel fractionalization, paramilitary involvement in conflict violence, and communal or ethnic conflict. In the article, we present a background to the data collection and provide descriptive statistics for the period 1989-2008 and then illustrate how the data can be used with the case of Somalia. These data move beyond state-centric conceptions of collective violence to facilitate research into the causes and consequences of group violence which occurs without state participation.

Communication Technology and Reports on Political Violence

“…In this paper, we use information from events of all different types of violence covered by UCDP-GED (Sundberg and Melander 2013). This means that we are exploring the reporting of events regardless of whether these constitute part of an armed conflict between states and/or rebels (Gleditsch et al 2002), nonstate conflict (including communal violence) (Sundberg, Eck and Kreutz 2012), or one-sided violence against civilians (Eck and Hultman 2007).…”

Does Security Imply Safety? On the (Lack of) Correlation Between Different Aspects of Security

“…In addition, there has been a considerable amount of literature on the correlation between different datasets of political violence (Eck 2012;Restrepo et al 2006;Sambanis 2004). But in marked contrast to, for instance, the study of terrorism, there has been little attention to the role of perceptions and aggregation in explaining these differences.…”

“…In 2007, a dataset on one-sided violence was introduced: amongst other criteria, a country is considered as experiencing one-sided violence if any armed actor perpetrates violence against civilians leading to more than 25 deaths (Eck and Hultman 2007). In 2012, a dataset on non-state conflict followed: amongst other criteria, a country is considered to be in non-state conflict if there are more than 25 deaths from battle between two or more non-state armed actors (Sundberg et al 2012). Both datasets thus include an indicator for technical security, as a step towards creating an indicator measuring whether the state as a whole is in non-state conflict or in a situation of one-sided violence.…”

Replaying Today’s Wars? A Study of the Conceptualization of Post-1989 Conflict in Digital “War” Games

“…In addition, concerning the regions in which the conflicts have taken place (based on the area classification by UCDP), a majority could be located in Asia and Africa, even though Europe saw an increase during the 1990s and in more recent years. Secondly, in relation to nonstate conflict, an increasing number has been recorded since 1989 (resulting in a higher number of non-state conflicts in comparison to all types of armed conflict combined in recent years), most of which have occurred in Africa and the Middle East (Sundberg et al 2012). Thirdly, concerning acts of one-sided violence against civilians, a significant number of acts have been recorded, most of which were committed in Africa, Asia, and to a lesser extent the Middle East, while they also have been increasingly committed by non-state actors since 1989 (Eck and Hultman 2007; for the entire paragraph, see Pettersson and Wallensteen 2015).…”