Clionadh’s monthly ACLED data & analysis outlook
Dear readers,
I welcome you back to my streams of consciousness, which have turned a bit dark.
We are now starting to understand more the fallout of the abrupt change in the humanitarian and development industry. One effect that I concentrate on here is the seizure in and of local information. As of early 2025, many sources for reliable, local information on crisis and conflict zones have scaled down their activities or ceased operations entirely.
Covering conflict-affected countries requires constant changes, shifts, and updates in information-sourcing strategies. In order to ensure reliable, robust, and thorough coverage, it is vital to constantly question and harness new or changed sources. This is, in fact, what takes the majority of our time here at ACLED. Doing this work is the difference between accurate investigations of complex violence versus harvesting automated noise or a highly curated, narrow, biased version of conflict in countries.1I have written about this problem here.
“Recent changes” require that we collectively reconsider the foundation of information sourcing. In particular, the United States government’s spending freezes and restructuring caused NGOs and media organizations across the globe to shut down or reduce their activities, but it was a drastic continuation of a trend. This has had three distinct impacts:
- There is a decrease in media coverage, specifically in foreign language media once supported by the US. Unstable futures (including stopping and then restarting important radio networks) threaten information from many less-well-covered countries and languages.
- There has been a severe reduction in humanitarian partners that produce data for public and open use. These include organizations whose primary aim was humanitarian response and those whose remit was conflict monitoring.
- In extreme cases, stop-work orders were issued for humanitarian and crisis data-producing organizations, including the Famine Early Warning Systems Network and other vital and complementary datasets. This has resulted in a cessation of important information but also widespread unemployment of those who gathered specific data in unstable countries.
What effect will information stoppages have on our awareness of conflict areas? The Humanitarian Data Exchange recently released its “State of Open Humanitarian Data” report, and, as expected, some vital information is at a high risk of not being available in the future. Conflict places already had limited media coverage, and with this cessation, some very early assessments suggest at least a 5% decline in reported global conflict events. The exact impact on local information environments varies, although it is clear that organizations in the Global South and across the African continent are heavily affected. In extreme cases, shutdowns can erase half of the usual conflict information from a country. In most other cases, the impact is less severe and is limited to a reduction of reported events for specific local areas. While reporting has shifted with organizations already filling gaps left by others, and the loss of some outlets run by the US Agency for Global Media could be cushioned by other media organizations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, this is less likely to happen for the already limited conflict coverage in Central Asia.
More disruption is expected over the next months as local organizations covering conflicts run out of whatever financial buffers they had. It is unclear to what extent other funders or organizations will step up to provide new funding or shift priorities to fill gaps. For those willing, there will certainly be opportunities to do so.
Moreover, because those reporting and monitoring networks were specifically established to cover conflicts in hard-to-reach areas with limited media, permanently losing this information will cause a significant decline in the quality of coverage. It will also introduce a lot of misinformation, specifically misinformation borne from assuming that no reports mean that “no conflict occurred here.” The debates on how to collect conflict information and undertake monitoring more generally have led to a very odd situation: Some collectors will openly say that they are not collecting all the information they can about conflict because some conflict “doesn’t look” like the forms they are used to collecting. This creates intentional gaps but also stunts any sort of reflection on how conflict adapts to fit new political circumstances (or, indeed, how conflict is entirely shaped by the domestic and present political-economic contexts and opportunities rather than the static, structural factors we have previously assumed motivated it). I don’t think any of us really want to return to ridiculous debates about how mountains are responsible for different conflict rates or dreaded “state failure” discussions that went nowhere. Missing data allows for these discussions to flourish, so that alone is a reason to make sure local people and groups can collect and disseminate this information.
Monitoring losses will introduce biases in our collective knowledge about specific conflicts, local politics, and larger violence trends within high-risk countries. Without verification abilities coming from local reporting networks, mis- and disinformation will thrive in low-information environments. In turn, what we know and how we know about these conflicts will be diminished. Furthermore, assertive government and commercial entities may step in, scooping up networks, staff, and information flows for their own use, and close off these vital resources to those organizations focused on cooperative information and public goods. Let’s not let this crisis go to waste; we need to reset the system toward the most useful outcomes for the most people.
ACLED webinar | Emerging frontlines: How Jihadist expansion is reshaping Benin, Niger, and Nigeria
On 28 March 2025, ACLED hosted a webinar to launch its report examining Jihadist expansion in the Sahel littoral borderlands. Since early 2024, the violent campaigns of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin and the Islamic State Sahel Province jihadist groups have been reshaping the security landscape in the Sahel and its littoral borderlands. These groups have significantly expanded their operations, transforming the regions bordering the Sahel toward the coast into an active conflict hotspot. It was moderated by me and featured speakers Héni Nsaibia, ACLED Senior Analyst for West Africa, and Dr. John Sunday Ojo, a postdoctoral research fellow at Leiden University. You can view the webinar recording here.
Select ACLED in the media!
- Middle East Regional Specialist Ameneh Mehvar was quoted in Al Jazeerah, elDiario.es, Newsweek, and Canary.
- Our Latin American expert, Tiziano Breda, was featured in Latin America Daily Briefing and El Universal.
- Europe & Central Asia Regional Specialist Nichita Gurcov’s insights on the war in Ukraine were featured in The Independent, Ukrainian news outlet UNN, and VOA.
- The Daily Euro Times ran an article by me on “The New Middle East: A Region In Flux,” and I had a brief chat on NPR about how ACLED’s Conflict Index sheds light on changing world order.
- Senior Analyst for West Africa Héni Nsaibia was quoted in the Washington Post’s article, “Russia’s Wagner mercenaries are leading a campaign of terror in Mali.”
- AFP, Times of Israel, France24, and The New Arab looked at our Red Sea Dashboard.
- AFP and France24 used our Myanmar Conflict Watchlist.
Notes and notions
Given the whirlwind of news about bad behavior, it is easy to miss that a ceasefire began in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The M23 rebels, with Rwanda’s help, had overtaken Goma, executed hundreds, and — as is their wont — wreaked repetitious havoc in the area. ACLED’s Africa Senior Analyst, Ladd Serwat, has covered these escalations and breaks extremely well, and so too did IPIS, who offered a fantastic discussion of the conflict and its political implications (with lovely maps).
Jérôme Tubiana is one of the best analysts on Sudan and the broader area we could hope to have. His February article on Darfur in The New York Review of Books is well worth your time. Another leading analyst is Joshua Craze, who has written, with Raga Makawi, on the politics of the RSF war machine, which is super informative.
The American liberal left’s Delilah (in podcast form) is Ezra Klein, who has a great recent show with David Shor. Shor is the most reliable guide to the changing electorate because he calls it as he sees it (and has taken a lot of pushback for speaking against the orthodoxy).
In my reading nook this month, “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams is a damning and gossipy indictment of Facebook and those who run it. It is actually just as bad as you thought it was. But one particular nugget stood out because it is bonkers: After the extremely traumatic and almost deadly birth of her second child, Sarah returned from maternity leave to a negative performance review because she was “unresponsive” to work calls during her time in a coma. Just to emphasize how bad this was, this was not a mistaken automated review; this was her boss punishing her for not picking up her phone while unconscious.
I also tried to read “Death Takes Me” by Cristina Rivera Garza, which promised to be a “cerebral, fragmentary, and disorienting” story about murders across Mexico where the victims are left castrated. The review linked above (by Nicolás Medina Mora) noted that the level of violence in Mexico induces “a disconcerting mixture of numbness and anxiety.” It is beautifully written and translated, but I am not much for the avant-garde or my novels being difficult. Life is difficult enough.
Should you wish to take a break from bleakness and celebrate the spring, I offer three distractions: first, grow grass. I have become evangelical about aerator shoes, which, if used poorly, could lead to a terrible case of stigmata, but used well, they make growing grass quite fun. The second is making a lovely dinner for any celebrations coming up: This is possibly the least work and the greatest reward I have come across, although you have to leave your oven on all day. The third is a dessert that is quite simple and delicious, and the treat I am planning for the end of Lent, which I like to enforce on the children with the severity of Sister George Michael.
In my obligatory Irish mention this month, we have this fool, who apparently has been shuffling literal shedloads of crystal meth in from Mexico to his garden center in Kerry (street value: 32 million euro). Clearly, something was up given his haircut, but for the love of god.
