Local government officials and administrators — including governors, mayors, councilors, and other civil servants — frequently come under attack by a wide array of armed actors, from cartels waging turf wars in Mexico to Russian occupying forces in Ukraine (see the ACLED report Administering Violence: An ACLED Special Project on Violence Targeting Local Officials). To systematically monitor this phenomenon and identify emerging trends, ACLED introduced a tag to track violence against local officials into the event dataset.
Violence targeting local officials and administrators is tracked for all countries covered by ACLED back to 1 January 2018, or their start-date of ACLED coverage, whichever is most recent (see ACLED’s country and time period coverage list).
