ucdp-ged

The UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset: every event of organised violence the Uppsala Conflict Data Program has recorded since 1989, one row each, with where it happened, when, who the sides were, and how many died. One subset per release, as UCDP published it, with a typed GeoParquet beside it.

CC BY 4.0, on condition that the publications UCDP lists are cited (see Licence).

Releases

UCDP publishes one release a year and moves the previous one to an archive page. Analyses are to state the release they used, so each release is its own subset, named by its version, and a new one is added beside the others.

subset	events	period	countries	zip	codebook
26.1	417,968	1989-01-01 to 2025-12-31	126	raw/26.1/ged261-csv.zip	raw/26.1/ged261.pdf
25.1	385,918	1989-01-01 to 2024-12-31	124	raw/25.1/ged251-csv.zip	raw/25.1/ged251.pdf
24.1	349,733	1989-01-01 to 2023-12-31	124	raw/24.1/ged241-csv.zip	raw/24.1/ged241.pdf
23.1	316,818	1989-01-01 to 2022-12-31	124	raw/23.1/ged231-csv.zip	raw/23.1/ged231.pdf
22.1	293,634	1989-01-01 to 2021-12-31	123	raw/22.1/ged221-csv.zip	raw/22.1/ged221.pdf
21.1	261,864	1989-01-01 to 2020-12-31	123	raw/21.1/ged211-csv.zip	raw/21.1/ged211.pdf
20.1	225,385	1989-01-01 to 2019-12-31	122	raw/20.1/ged201-csv.zip	raw/20.1/ged201.pdf
19.1	152,616	1989-01-01 to 2018-12-31, without Syria	120	raw/19.1/ged191-csv.zip	raw/19.1/ged191.pdf

The period is that of date_start. In 22.1 three events that began in late December 2021 end in January 2022.

The zips and codebooks are UCDP's own files, byte for byte; each release's MANIFEST.json gives their URLs, sizes, sha256 and Last-Modified. Releases 20.1 to 26.1 have the same 49 columns. 19.1 is the oldest release here because it is the oldest with a codebook on UCDP's archive page, so every column of every release is explained. Monthly candidate releases are not here.

19.1 differs from the rest:

• It leaves Syria out. Its codebook: "Data for Syria is not included in 19.1 version – a separate release V 652.1601.1911 was released for the period 2016-01-01 to 2019-11-30 on 2019-12-17." That separate release is not here.
• It has 42 columns. It lacks relid, code_status, conflict_dset_id, dyad_dset_id, side_a_dset_id, side_b_dset_id and where_description.
• Its CSV writes date_start and date_end as a date without a time; they are midnight in the Parquet, as in the other releases.

Columns and types

The meaning of every column is in the release's codebook. In the Parquet the type comes from the column's name, never from inference:

columns	type
id, year, type_of_violence, *_dset_id, *_new_id, number_of_sources, where_prec, priogrid_gid, country_id, event_clarity, date_prec, deaths_*, best, high, low	BIGINT
latitude, longitude	DOUBLE
date_start, date_end	TIMESTAMP
active_year	INTEGER, 1 or 0
everything else, including gwnoa and gwnob	the text of the CSV
geometry	added here: a point from longitude and latitude (WGS 84)

active_year is 1 when the event belongs to an active conflict, dyad or actor year, and 0 otherwise, as every codebook defines it. The CSVs of 19.1 to 24.1 write 1 and 0; those of 25.1 and 26.1 write true and false, which are read here as 1 and 0, so the column means the same in every release. (Until 2026-10-02 this dataset held 25.1 and 26.1 only, with active_year as BOOLEAN.)

gwnoa holds lists such as 2;200;900. A type inferrer that sees integers in its first rows takes it for a number and stops at row 138,884 of 25.1.

type_of_violence is 1 state-based conflict, 2 non-state conflict, 3 one-sided violence. best is UCDP's best estimate of deaths and equals the sum of the four deaths_* columns; low and high are its low and high estimates. They do not always bracket best: 5,075 rows of 26.1, 4,967 of 25.1 and 2,506 of 19.1 break low <= best <= high. The codebook explains this only for events of event_clarity 2, so check the order before using them as an interval.

-- DuckDB, straight off the Hub: deaths by year and type of violence, release 26.1
SELECT year, type_of_violence, sum(best) AS deaths
FROM 'hf://datasets/yuiseki/ucdp-ged/parquet/26.1/ged.parquet'
GROUP BY ALL ORDER BY ALL;

Checked before upload

scripts/02_verify.py in the source repository checks each release with DuckDB: every id once; every column of the type its name gives; GeoParquet 1.0.0 with a point on every row; a filter on the geometry and a filter on the coordinates return the same events; the totals of best and deaths_civilians and the counts by type of violence equal those counted from the CSV in the zip with Python's csv module; a DuckDB without the spatial extension opens the file; no row group has a bloom filter.

release	best	deaths_civilians	type 1	type 2	type 3
26.1	4,257,891	1,570,458	292,121	61,451	64,396
25.1	3,957,143	1,474,095	271,331	54,982	59,605
24.1	3,791,599	1,426,646	246,119	49,046	54,568
23.1	3,357,346	1,370,447	227,509	40,642	48,667
22.1	2,861,164	1,092,263	213,689	35,665	44,280
21.1	2,690,686	1,045,569	192,769	29,005	40,090
20.1	2,546,751	982,732	166,379	22,923	36,083
19.1	2,089,095	870,239	107,247	14,228	31,141

The releases are not one series cut at different years: UCDP revises past events between releases, so the same year can have other totals in another release. Outside Syria, 2010 has 6,008 events and 30,862 deaths (best) in 19.1, and 9,139 events and 34,898 deaths in 26.1; 1,908 events in both releases have a different best.

Things to know

The source_* columns quote news reports: the outlet, the date and the headline. They are empty for 97,496 rows of 26.1, most of them before 2013 (and for between 97,913 and 106,398 rows of the older releases). UCDP distributes them under the same licence as the rest; whether the headlines themselves are UCDP's to license was not checked.

HDX carries country extracts of UCDP data labelled cc-by-igo. This dataset follows UCDP's own download page, which says CC BY 4.0.

Licence

UCDP's download page (https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/, read on 2026-10-02):

All datasets are free of charge and licensed under CC BY 4.0

and, after a dash in the original,

you are free to use and redistribute them provided you cite the relevant publications listed with each dataset.

Cite for release 26.1, as the download page lists:

• Davies, Shawn, Therése Pettersson and Magnus Öberg (2026). Organized violence 1989–2025, and violent political protests. Journal of Peace Research. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopres/xjag046
• Sundberg, Ralph and Erik Melander (2013). Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset. Journal of Peace Research 50(4): 523-532. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343313484347

Cite for release 25.1, as its download page listed:

• Davies, S., Pettersson, T., Sollenberg, M., and Öberg, M. (2025). Organized violence 1989–2024, and the challenges of identifying civilian victims. Journal of Peace Research 62(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251345636
• Sundberg and Melander (2013), as above.

Cite for releases 19.1 to 24.1, as the cover of each codebook asks ("please always cite"); the archive page lists no publications for them:

• Sundberg and Melander (2013), as above.

For every release, when appropriate, also its codebook, as the cover asks: Högbladh, Stina, year of the release, "UCDP GED Codebook version" and the version, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University. For example Högbladh, Stina (2026), "UCDP GED Codebook version 26.1", and Högbladh, Stina (2019), "UCDP GED Codebook version 19.1". Always state the version used.

The zips and codebooks are UCDP's, unchanged. The Parquet is made from them; LICENSE beside this file says what was done.