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Deaths in armed conflicts based on where they occurred

What you should know about this indicator

  • An armed conflict is a disagreement between organized groups, or between one organized group and civilians, that causes at least 25 deaths during a year. This includes combatant and civilian deaths due to fighting.
  • This includes , , , , and .
  • UCDP identifies conflict deaths based on news reports, other contemporary sources, and academic research.
  • 'Best' death estimates as identified by UCDP.
Deaths in armed conflicts based on where they occurred
The best estimate of the number of deaths of combatants and civilians due to fighting in interstate, intrastate, extrasystemic, non-state conflicts, and one-sided violence that were ongoing that year.
Source
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (2025); geoBoundaries (2023) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
June 13, 2025
Date range
1989–2024
Unit
deaths

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

This dataset is UCDP's most disaggregated dataset, covering individual events of organized violence (phenomena of lethal violence occurring at a given time and place). These events are sufficiently fine-grained to be geo-coded down to the level of individual villages, with temporal durations disaggregated to single, individual days.

You can find more notes at https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/ged/ged251.pdf

Retrieved on
June 13, 2025
Retrieved from
https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/index.html#ged_global
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Davies, S., Pettersson, T., Sollenberg, M., & Öberg, M. (2025). Organized violence 1989–2024, and the challenges of identifying civilian victims. Journal of Peace Research, 62(4).
Sundberg, Ralph and Erik Melander (2013) Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset. Journal of Peace Research 50(4).

Built by the community and William & Mary geoLab, the geoBoundaries Global Database of Political Administrative Boundaries Database is an online, open license (CC BY 4.0 / ODbL) resource of information on administrative boundaries (i.e., state, county) for every country in the world. Since 2016, they have tracked approximately 1 million boundaries within over 200 entities, including all UN member states.

Retrieved on
June 26, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.geoboundaries.org/globalDownloads.html
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Runfola, Daniel, Community Contributors, and [v4.0: Lindsey Rogers, Joshua Habib, Sidonie Horn, Sean Murphy, Dorian Miller, Hadley Day, Lydia Troup, Dominic Fornatora, Natalie Spage, Kristina Pupkiewicz, Michael Roth, Carolina Rivera, Charlie Altman, Isabel Schruer, Tara McLaughlin, Russ Biddle, Renee Ritchey, Emily Topness, James Turner, Sam Updike, Helena Buckman, Neel Simpson, Jason Lin], [v2.0: Austin Anderson, Heather Baier, Matt Crittenden, Elizabeth Dowker, Sydney Fuhrig, Seth Goodman, Grace Grimsley, Rachel Layko, Graham Melville, Maddy Mulder, Rachel Oberman, Joshua Panganiban, Andrew Peck, Leigh Seitz, Sylvia Shea, Hannah Slevin, Rebecca Yougerman, Lauren Hobbs]. "geoBoundaries: A global database of political administrative boundaries." Plos one 15, no. 4 (2020): e0231866. Online at www.geoboundaries.org.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

UCDP provides geographical coordinates of each conflict event. We have mapped these coordinates to countries by means of the geoBoundaries dataset.

In some instances, the event's coordinates fall within the borders of a country. Other times, the event's coordinates fall outside the borders of a country. In the latter case, we have mapped the event to the country that is closest to the event's coordinates.

Conflict event with id "53238" and relid "PAK-2003-1-345-88" was assigned to "Siachen-Saltoro" by geoBoundaries. We have mapped it to "Pakistan" following the text in the where_description field from UCDP, which refers to "Giang sector in Siachen, Pakistani Kashmir".

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Deaths in armed conflicts based on where they occurred”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, and Max Roser (2024) - “War and Peace”. Data adapted from Uppsala Conflict Data Program, geoBoundaries. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250627-094656/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts-by-country.html [online resource] (archived on June 27, 2025).
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Uppsala Conflict Data Program (2025); geoBoundaries (2023) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Uppsala Conflict Data Program (2025); geoBoundaries (2023) – processed by Our World in Data. “Deaths in armed conflicts based on where they occurred” [dataset]. Uppsala Conflict Data Program, “Georeferenced Event Dataset v25.1”; geoBoundaries, “geoBoundaries - Comprehensive Global Administrative Zones (CGAZ) 6.0.0” [original data]. Retrieved June 27, 2025 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250627-094656/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts-by-country.html (archived on June 27, 2025).