Data Export Tool: User guide

Quick-start guide

The Data Export Tool is organized into five sections corresponding to major elements in the data — Date, Event, Location, Actor, and Popular Themes — as well as a final Output Options section. Make selections as needed. Active selections will appear in yellow on the right-hand side of the screen. Default selections will already appear when you open the tool. 

When you are ready, click “See results” at the bottom of the tool to display a link to download the relevant data in a .CSV file.

Tip: Click “Save this search” to name and store the search so you can run it again later. Saved searches can be accessed via “My saved searches” at the top of the page, where you can re-run or delete them.

A note on filtering

Unless you are looking for a very specific event or subset of the dataset, applying too many filters at once can unintentionally exclude relevant events. We recommend starting with broad filters, reviewing the results, and narrowing your search step by step. 

Download limits and account access

The Data Export Tool may look different depending on your access level. Some filters described in this guide may only be available to users with a higher access level. Access to event-level and most recently updated data varies by access level. If you are not seeing the data options you believe you should have access to, please contact the access team at [email protected]. 

For more information on access levels and how to upgrade, please see Frequently Asked Questions about myACLED.

Example searches

Not sure where to start? Try one of these pre-set searches. Each link opens the Data Export Tool with filters pre-applied. Review the results and adjust any of the filters, including dates, as needed. Then click “Save this search” to store the search filters for later.

All US military forces
Retrieves all events involving US military forces in the most recent week of ACLED data. 

All events updated last week 
Retrieves all events added or updated in the most recent data publication.

All civilian targeting events
Retrieves all events where civilians were the main target of violence.

Gangs and cartels in Latin America and the Caribbean 
Retrieves all events involving gangs and cartels in Latin America.

All rebel groups and political militias in Africa
Retrieves all events involving rebel groups and political militias in Africa. 
 

Fields

Choosing a data type (Event-level or aggregated data)

At the top of the page, select “Event-level data” or “Aggregated.” Event-level data is the standard ACLED export, which includes one row per event in full detail. The “Aggregated” selection exports events summarized to the week and Admin 1 levels, and is better suited to higher-level trend analysis or for users in the Open or Research access levels. For more information on using aggregated data, please see How to use ACLED's Aggregated Data.

1 - Date filters

Select a date range to specify the period of events to include. Please note that users in the Research access level get event data with a 12-month lag. Biweekly and daily data are available at higher access levels. For more information on access levels and how to upgrade, see Frequently Asked Questions about myACLED. 

The available data filter options are:

1. Custom date range
2. Most recent week of ACLED data (default setting)
3. Most recent month (4 Weeks) of ACLED data
4. Most recent year (52 Weeks) of ACLED data
5. All available dates

Which option should I use?

“Most recent week of ACLED data” is the default setting and retrieves the most recently published batch of ACLED data, covering the preceding Saturday to Friday. Users with access to biweekly or daily data can click on “Custom date range” to select more recent dates.

Advanced options: last updated date

Expand the “Advanced options” menu to see further ways to filter by date.

The “Last updated date” filters allow you to see events that have been added or changed since the last time you downloaded the data. The filters correspond to when an event was added or updated in the dataset. Events are updated for a variety of reasons, including when newly available reporting is used to correct or add additional information to an existing event (e.g., updated fatalities figures, improved actor information).  

When are ACLED data updated?

The availability of the latest ACLED data depends on two factors. First, your account level determines whether you have access to more or less frequent updates. For example, some users have access to biweekly or daily data. Second, the data update schedule as well as time-period coverage varies by country or region. See ACLED's detailed Country/time-period coverage and view ACLED’s complete data publication schedule for more information.

2 - Event filters

Select event types and/or sub-event types using the “Disorder type,” “Event type,” and “Event subtype” dropdown menus. These three filters follow a hierarchy from broad to specific: Disorder types are the broadest categories, with event types nested within them; event subtypes are then nested within those and are the most specific categories. This means if you wanted to capture all protest events, you can simply select “Protests” on the “Event type” menu rather than selecting each protest-related sub-event type from the “Event subtype” menu.

Selections across all three dropdown menus are additive, which means adding more selections expands your results rather than narrowing them. For example, selecting the “Battles” event type and the “Peaceful protest” sub-event type returns all events matching either category. 

To retrieve “conflict events,” we recommend selecting “Political violence” from the Disorder type menu. For broad event results, start with Disorder type or Event type. For more on how ACLED defines each category, see the ACLED Codebook section on events. 

3 - Location filters

Select a region and/or country to filter by location. Selections are additive: Selecting “Middle East” and “Mexico,” for example, will return events in either place. Leave these fields blank to include all locations.

Advanced options: administrative levels

Expand the Advanced options menu to filter by the most granular geographic levels available. Administrative levels follow a hierarchy from broad to specific:

1. Admin 1: The largest sub-national administrative region (e.g., state, province, etc).
2. Admin 2: The second-largest sub-national administrative region. 
3. Admin 3: The third-largest sub-national administrative region.
4. Location: The name of the specific location. 

Note: Selecting a country does not automatically populate the lower administrative-level locations fields with a list to choose from. Start typing the name of the geographic location you are looking for in the relevant field to see matching results. 

If you are unfamiliar with a country’s administrative structure in ACLED data, start with a country or Admin 1 filters before narrowing further. See this list of all administrative divisions in ACLED’s data. Note that Admin 2- or Admin 3-level location information is not applicable to all regions, countries, and territories in the dataset. For more, see the ACLED Codebook section on event geography.

Maritime locations

To filter for events occurring in international waters, select “Maritime region” from the Advanced options menu. Maritime subdivisions 1 and 2 allow for finer filtering within a given maritime region. These subdivisions correspond to the “Admin 1” and “Admin 2” fields of the event. 

Filter selections for maritime locations are not additive, and the maritime subdivision menus will therefore filter to reflect the choice made in the maritime region field. For example, selecting “Arctic Ocean” in the maritime region field will pre-filter the maritime subdivision fields to only the subdivisions that exist in the Arctic Ocean. For more information on how ACLED codes maritime events, please see Data update: Improved maritime locations in ACLED's global dataset.

4 - Actor filters

Select actor type and/or actor name. These filters are additive: Making selections in both fields returns events that match either filter.

Use "Actor type" to filter by one of ACLED’s actor categories, such as State forces, Rebel groups, Political militias, or Civilians. Use "Actor name" to filter by a specific organization, group, or institution. Actor names follow ACLED's standardized terminology as they are coded in the dataset. Start typing to browse the dropdown and find the name used in the dataset. If you cannot find the actor you are looking for, please try alternative spellings (ACLED uses US spelling for actors like "Labor group (United Kingdom)" but local spellings for specific actor names like "Labour Party (United Kingdom)"), or search the first few letters of an actor to return possible matching results. 

For example, to search for a FARC faction, begin by typing ‘“FARC”:

The military and police forces of a country often appear as many separate actors based on the regime year they are associated with or a subdivision. To pull events involving all military or police forces of a country, search for “Military Forces of [country name]” or “Police Forces of [country name]” and select the option with “(All)” at the end. This will capture all of the various military or police force actors for that country. 

A note on filtering by a named actor

Named actor filters can significantly narrow results. Apply these only when a specific actor is central to your research question. Consider initially leaving actor filters blank and reviewing your first results to identify the types of actors and actor names typically involved in events in the regional data of interest before adding an actor name filter. For more, see Actor type and actor definitions in the ACLED Codebook.

Actor 1, Actor 2, and Associated Actors

The "Actor name" filter searches across all actor columns in the dataset. The results will include matching event records from the Actor 1, Actor 2, and Associated Actor fields. Associated Actors 1 and 2 record the associated groups for specific events as well as the identity of specific actors. The Associated actor fields are not filterable on the tool, but will appear in your downloaded data.

For example, filtering for “Labor Group (United Kingdom)” will pull matching records found in any of Actor 1, Actor 2, Associated Actor 1, and Associated Actor 2 categories. 

5 - Popular themes

Use this section to apply theme or tag-based filters that return a subset of events from the dataset. 

A tag or theme is a label ACLED applies to events in the dataset that relate to a specific analytical category, such as election violence or insurgencies. Tags and themes allow you to quickly filter for events relevant to a particular topic without needing to construct a complex combination of filters.

We recommend using popular themes for highly specific searches rather than as a starting point for broad exploration. Filters in this section are additive: Selecting election violence and a fatality threshold of five or more, for example, will return both events related to election violence and events that have five or more fatalities.

Please note that not all events are categorized by a theme or tag, so filtering by a popular theme will only return events that carry that specific tag. For comprehensive results, apply event type, date, and location filters first, and add a popular theme only when you want to narrow to events tagged or grouped under a specific analytical category.

If a specific theme or tag is selected, the results will appear in their own column at the end of the outputted CSV file. 

Keyword search in Notes

Use this filter to return all events where a specific keyword is present in the Notes column of an event. 

The “Notes” column contains a narrative description of the event. The description may include additional contextual detail not captured in the structured variables of the dataset. This filter can be a useful way to surface events specific to qualitative information. For example, searching "defusal" may return events whose notes mention defusal activity. However, this is not a systematic filter: Results depend on the language used in individual event notes, and the information available in the original source reports may vary between countries and regions. Therefore, relevant events may be missed if the keyword does not appear in the notes. 

Note: Keyword searches are case-insensitive and accept a single phrase, not multi-keyword searches. If you enter a phrase containing more than one word, the search will return events whose notes contain those exact words in that order. 

Civilian targeting

ACLED’s Civilian targeting column allows you to filter events in which civilians were the main or only target of an event. Select this filter to include only events where civilians were the targets of violence. 

This filter is useful if your research focuses specifically on harm to civilian populations, as it allows you to isolate all events where civilians were targeted without manually reviewing all event and sub-event types where civilian targeting can occur. 

Fatalities

Use the range slider, or type in the numbers in the minimum/maximum range, to filter by reported fatalities related to individual events. The default range is 0 to 4,000 and captures all events. Adjust the minimum and/or maximum values to narrow results to events within a specific fatality range.

This filter is useful if you want to refine the dataset for events above or below a certain severity threshold for fatalities per event.

Conflict categories

Filter for a subset of events in the dataset by applying ACLED’s conflict categories: Atrocities, Foreign military engagement, Insurgencies, Repression, and Terrorism. 

Election violence

Selecting “Election" or “Poll” filters for events when the voting process was directly affected or targeted, based on ACLED’s automated election violence tags. For more on how these tags are defined and applied, see Election violence automated tags.

Actor groupings

Filter for events that involve Islamic State (IS) or Gang/Cartel actors.

US-Iran regional conflict

Select this box to filter for events associated with the US-Iran regional conflict that began following the joint US and Israel offensive against Iran on 28 February 2026. For more information on this dataset, please see Iran Crisis Live.

Show population exposure

These filters add a column with the estimated population living within a given distance of the event location. Options are within 1 kilometer, 2 kilometers, and 5 kilometers of an event, as well as ACLED’s "best" estimate, which reflects the estimate we recommend using for the given event type and fatality count. For more on ACLED’s Conflict Exposure and “best” estimate, please see the Conflict Exposure methodology. 

6 - Output options

These settings control how the exported data are formatted. 

One actor per row

By default, each row in the exported file represents one ACLED event, and all actors are recorded in separate columns (Actor 1, Actor 2, Associated Actor 1, and Associated Actor 2). Checking "One actor per row" disaggregates the data so that each actor appearing in any of those columns gets its own row. An event involving multiple actors will, therefore, appear as multiple rows in the file.

Note: This option is not recommended for analysis on overall event counts because it will inflate the total number of rows. It is particularly useful for actor-level analysis, as it allows you to filter or count by actor without needing to search across the multiple actor columns.

Numeric interaction codes

By default, events are exported with text values in the interaction code columns (Inter1, Inter2, Interaction). Check this option if you would prefer the values to be exported in numeric format, in line with the legacy format of ACLED data. For more information on text versus numeric values for interaction codes, please see the Interaction Code Format Change notice.

Semicolon delimiter

Check this option if you want the output file to use a semicolon (;) instead of a comma (,) as the delimiter. This option is recommended for users opening files in Excel with regional settings that use commas as decimal separators.

Downloading your data

Once you have made your filter selections, click "See results" to display a table with the results, along with a link to download the data as a CSV file.

Each column in the file corresponds to a variable in the ACLED dataset. Definitions for all variables are available in the ACLED Codebook.