27 February 2024 Update: Correction of 'Violent Demonstration' Events in Indonesia

Published on: 27 February 2024

In accordance with the ACLED Codebook, the ‘Violent demonstration’ sub-event type is assigned when demonstrators engage in violent or destructive acts. Recently, ACLED undertook a comprehensive review of ‘Violent demonstration’ events in its Indonesia dataset to enhance data accuracy. As a result, corrections were applied to 546 ‘Violent demonstration’ events.

Key Changes

Correction Period: The data corrections span from January 2015 (the beginning of ACLED’s Indonesia coverage) to the present.

Publication Date: The corrected data were published on 27 February 2024, and new data will be coded according to the same guidelines henceforth.

Reclassification and impact:

• Following the review, there has been a substantial decrease (approximately 45.5%) in the number of ‘Violent demonstration’ events coded in Indonesia.
  • Out of the 1,199 events reviewed, 488 were reclassified as ‘Peaceful protest’
  • An additional 58 events were reclassified as ‘Protest with intervention.’

Nature of the corrections:

• Many corrections involved events where demonstrators burned tires without further destructive actions.
• Other significant adjustments related to instances where demonstrators simply blocked roads using wood, logs, stones, or easily movable objects.
• Instances where demonstrators only threw light objects (e.g. eggs, plastic bottles, burnt wood) without additional violent actions were also reclassified.

These data corrections are part of a larger initiative to improve ACLED’s ‘Violent demonstration’ event data. For more information, see  “‘Violent demonstration’ Event Data Improvement Project” or reach out to [email protected].