Sources on security incidents

For data on violent incidents, datasets from the organisation Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) have been used. ACLED is a project collecting, analysing and mapping information on crisis and conflict in Africa, south and south-east Asia and Middle East and provides datasets on conflict incidents, coding each incident with the time and place, type of violent incident, the parties involved and an estimate on the number of fatalities. It also provides relevant breakdowns per region, actor, type of incident, and period. The information is collected in a database that is accessible via registration, searchable and kept continuously up to date. The data primarily come from secondary sources such as traditional media reports, but also from reports by international institutions and non-governmental organisations, targeted new media platforms, and data provided by local partners of ACLED.3

ACLED codes security incidents as follows:

• Battles: violent clashes between at least two armed groups. Battles can occur between armed and organised state, non-state, and external groups, and in any combination therein. Sub-events of battles are armed clashes, government regaining territory and non-state actor overtaking territory.

• Violence against civilians: violent events where an organised armed group deliberately inflicts violence upon unarmed non-combatants. It includes violent attacks on unarmed civilians such as sexual violence, attacks, abduction/forced disappearance.

• Explosions/remote violence: events where an explosion, bomb or other explosive device was used to engage in conflict. They include one-sided violent events in which the tool for engaging in conflict creates asymmetry by taking away the ability of the targets to engage or defend themselves and their location. They include air/drone strikes, suicide bombs, shelling/artillery/missile attacks, remote explosives/landmines/IEDs, grenades, chemical weapons.

• Riots: are a violent demonstration, often involving a spontaneous action by unorganised, unaffiliated members of society. They include violent demonstration, mob violence.

• Protests: public demonstration in which the participants do not engage in violence, though violence may be used against them. It includes peaceful protests, protests with intervention, excessive force against protesters.

• Strategic developments: information regarding the activities of violent groups that is not itself recorded as political violence, yet may trigger future events or contribute to political dynamics within and across states. It includes agreements, changes to group/activity, non-violent transfers of territory, arrests.4

• For the purpose of providing information for the assessment of serious and individual threat to a civilian’s life or person by reason of indiscriminate violence in situations of international or internal armed conflict (Article 15(c) of the Qualification Regulation), only the following type of events have been included in the analysis: battles, explosions/remote violence and violence against civilians.

Additionally, ACLED codes actors involved in security incidents as follows: Actor 1 is the ‘[o]ne of two main actors involved in the event (does not necessarily indicate the aggressor)’ and Actor 2 is the ‘[o]ne of two main actors involved in the event (does not necessarily indicate the target or victim)’,5 while ‘[i]n most cases, an event requires two actors, noted in columns ‘Actor 1’ and ‘Actor 2’.However, the ‘Explosions/Remote violence’, ‘Riots’, ‘Protests’, and ‘Strategic developments’ event types can include one-sided events’.6 When focusing on the involvement of specific actors within certain regions, the drafters based their analysis on all those incidents, where ACLED coded the relevant actor either as ‘Actor 1’ or as ‘Actor 2’. This approach aims to illustrate the general level of involvement of the respective actors in the conflict without distinguishing between Actor 1 and Actor 2, as these categories, according to ACLED's methodology, do not indicate any differentiation in terms of content/semantics.

Characteristics and potential limits for COI use of ACLED data are:

• Data primarily come from secondary sources such as media reports. Lack of or underreporting might critically affect the depiction and the assessment of the situation on the ground.

• ACLED’s database only provides figures of direct deaths or fatalities per event,7 not of injured persons and casualties; indirect deaths resulting from security events, which in the relevant literature range in average between 3 and 9 more deaths per fatality, are also not taken into consideration.8

• The coding of events as ‘battles’, ‘explosions’, or ‘violence against civilians’ is independent from their actual impact on civilians. While acts of ‘violence against civilians’ are always co-coded as ‘civilian targeting’,9 ‘explosions’ may be or may not, depending on whether civilians were the main or only target;10 ‘battles’ instead, never are.11

• Geographical precision is variable: the provincial capital will represent the region if no further precisions are available and may be over-represented.12

• Security incidents numbers and associated graphs/maps at country and governorate level are based on an ACLED dataset that is accessible via registration.13 Whenever other sources on security incidents were available over the reference period, ACLED’s data have been corroborated/contrasted with other data.