ACLED in R

The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a.k.a. ACLED, produces up-to-date event data on certain kinds of political conflict in Africa and, as of 2015, parts of Asia. In this post, I’m not going to dwell on the project’s sources and methods, which you can read about on ACLED’s About page, in the 2010 journal article that introduced the project, or in the project’s user’s guides. Nor am I going to dwell on the necessity of using all political event data sets, including ACLED, with care—understanding the sources of bias in how they observe events and error in how they code them and interpreting (or, in extreme cases, ignoring) the resulting statistics accordingly.

Instead, my only aim here is to share an R script I’ve written that largely automates the process of downloading and merging ACLED’s historical and current Africa data and then creates a new data frame with counts of events by type at the country-month level. If you use ACLED in R, this script might save you some time and some space on your hard drive.

You can find the R script on GitHub, here.

The chief problem with this script is that the URLs and file names of ACLED’s historical and current data sets change with every update, so the code will need to be modified each time that happens. If the names were modular and the changes to them predictable, it would be easy to rewrite the code to keep up with those changes automatically. Unfortunately, they aren’t, so the best I can do for now is to give step-by-step instructions in comments embedded in the script on how to update the relevant four fields by hand. As long as the basic structure of the .csv files posted by ACLED doesn’t change, though, the rest should keep working.

[UPDATE: I revised the script so it will scrape the link addresses from the ACLED website and parse the file names from them. The new version worked after ACLED updated its real-time file earlier today, when the old version would have broken. Unless ACLED changes its file-naming conventions or the structure of its website, the version should work for the rest of 2015. In case it does fail, instructions on how to hard-code a workaround are included as comments at the bottom of the script.]

It should also be easy to adapt the part of the script that generates country-month event counts to slice the data even more finely, or to count by something other than event type. To do that, you would just need to add variables to the group_by() part of the block of code that produces the object ACLED.cm. For example, if you wanted to get counts of events by type at the level of the state or province, you would revise that line to read group_by(gwno, admin1, year, month, event_type). Or, if you wanted country-month counts of events by the type(s) of actor involved, you could use group_by(gwno, year, month, interaction) and then see this user’s guide to decipher those codes. You get the drift.

The script also shows a couple of examples of how to use ‘gglot2’ to generate time-series plots of those monthly counts. Here’s one I made of monthly counts of battle events by country for the entire period covered by ACLED as of this writing: January 1997–June 2015. A production-ready version of this plot would require some more tinkering with the size of the country names and the labeling of the x-axis, but the kind of small-multiples chart offers a nice way to explore the data before analysis.

Monthly counts of battle events, January 1997-June 2015

If you use the script and find flaws in it or have ideas on how to make it work better or do more, please email me at ulfelder <at> gmail <dot> com.

Posted by Jay Ulfelder on July 19, 2015

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