Department of Peace and Conflict Research methodology

The unit of analysis in the UCDP GED is the ‘event’ – an instance of fatal organized violence. Specifically an event is defined as:

The incidence of the use of armed force by an organized actor against another organized actor, or against civilians, resulting in at least 1 direct death in either the best, low or high estimate categories at a specific location and for a specific temporal duration (Sundberg and Melander, 2013)

Each instance of organized violence that meets these criteria is recorded as a single observation in the dataset and constitutes a unit of analysis. From this definition of an event, it follows that the dataset contains only events in which it was possible to deduce fatality estimates; incidents where it is unclear how many, or if there were any, fatalities are not included. These criteria are adapted from the UCDP’s base definition of what constitutes an armed conflict/non-state conflict/ one-sided violence, but with the removal of the 25 deaths criterion (in the calendar year) so as to place the definition on the level of the individual event.

The dataset contains events for all dyads and actors that, per calendar year, surpass the 25 deaths threshold for inclusion – the same threshold that is applied across all of the UCDP’s data on organized violence.