Executive Summary
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine escalated the war to a level that dwarfed all other conflicts in 2022, both in the sheer scale of violence and its deadliness. It also obscured a significant overall deterioration of the security situation in most other regions worldwide. Driven by heightened levels of conflict in both new and longstanding hotspots, political violence increased substantially over the course of the year.
While 2022 saw some positive developments – including a significant reduction in total violent events in places like Afghanistan and Yemen after years of war – these gains only represent qualified improvements. Despite the aggregate decline in events in Afghanistan and Yemen, for example, they remain home to two of the most complex and severe conflict environments in the world. Globally, political violence targeting civilians became not only more common but also more deadly in 2022, underscoring the fact that it is civilian communities that are increasingly shouldering the burden of rising conflict levels around the world.
Glossary
| Civilian targeting | Violence targeting civilians – or civilian targeting – is a category that encompasses all events of political violence that target civilians. This includes a broader scope than the violence against civilians event type (sexual violence, attack, and abduction/forced disappearance sub-event types). It is inclusive of the aforementioned sub-event types, the excessive force against protesters sub-event type, as well as explosions/remote violence and mob violence events that involve civilians. |
| Deadliness | Deadliness represents the number of reported fatalities, which can be aggregated over a period of time or series of events. |
| Demonstrations | Demonstration events is an umbrella term for all protest events and riot events, excluding mob violence events. |
| Disorder | Political disorder is used to refer to all political violence and demonstrations captured by ACLED. This effectively includes all events in the ACLED dataset, with the exception “strategic developments”. |
| Fatalities | ACLED distinguishes between fatalities and casualties. The use of the term fatalities always refers to reported deaths arising from each event and recorded in the dataset. Casualties may refer to injuries or fatalities and, as such, any reference to casualties in ACLED analysis is qualitative and not based on the dataset itself. |
| Lethality | Lethality refers to the rate of deadliness: reported fatalities divided by events. |
| Political violence | Political violence is defined as the use of force by a group with a political purpose or motivation. In analysis, this is a category used to refer collectively to ACLED’s violence against civilians, battles, explosions/remote violence, and excessive force against protesters event types, as well as the mob violence sub-event type of the riots event type. |
Key Findings
Political violence increased substantially in 2022, as demonstration activity fell. Worsening political violence levels were evident in most regions around the world, but clearest in Europe and Central Asia, where Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove a fourfold year-on-year increase. Demonstrations, meanwhile, declined in every region after multiple years of increases. Overall, political violence events rose by 27% compared to 2021, while demonstration events fell by 12%.
The civilian burden of political violence continued to worsen. Violence targeting civilians increased by 12% globally in 2022 compared to 2021. It was also more lethal: estimated fatalities from direct targeting of civilians grew by at least 16% last year.
Of identified actors recorded by ACLED, rebel forces surpassed domestic state forces as the deadliest perpetrators of violence targeting civilians, though state forces were responsible for more events. While unidentified actors still accounted for the largest share of violence targeting civilians and reported fatalities globally, at 43% of all events and 39% of all fatalities, rebel groups and domestic state forces accounted for 10% and 15% of events, respectively, with each contributing to approximately 15% of fatalities.
Conflict in 2022 was increasingly fought in the air, as on-the-ground confrontations fell, contributing to an overall reduction in the lethality of recorded political violence events. An aggregate decline in the number of armed clashes, one of the deadliest forms of political violence, precipitated a decrease in the overall lethality of reported events in 2022.
State forces used deadly violence against demonstrators in an increasing number of countries. In Iran and Kazakhstan, hundreds of demonstrators were killed by state forces, with dozens more fatalities reported in places like Chad, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
