PSCI 226: Politics of Intervention in Africa: Datasets

A pan-African series of national public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, and society

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) collects the dates, actors, types of violence, locations, and fatalities of all reported political violence and protest events across Africa, South Asia, South East Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. The ACLED team conducts analysis to describe, explore and test conflict scenarios, and makes both data and analysis open to freely use by the public.

The Fund for Peace is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit organization that works to promote sustainable security globally. The Fragile States Index includes datasets and analytics of collected data at both global and country levels.

The Harvard Dataverse Repository is a free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline, both inside and outside of the Harvard community, where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data.

The National Elections across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) dataset provides detailed information on all election events from 1945-2015.

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) is the world’s main provider of data on organized violence and the oldest ongoing data collection project for civil war, with a history of almost 40 years. Its definition of armed conflict has become the global standard of how conflicts are systematically defined and studied.

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. V-Dem provides a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.