Social Conflict in Africa: A New Database

Abstract

We describe the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD), a new event dataset for conducting research and analysis on various forms of social and political unrest in Africa. SCAD contains information on over 7,200 instances of protests, riots, strikes, government repression, communal violence, and other forms of unrest for 47 African countries from 1990–2010. SCAD includes information on event dates, actors and targets, lethality, georeferenced location information, and other conflict attributes. This article gives an overview of the data collection process, presents descriptive statistics and trends across the continent, and compares SCAD to the widely used Banks event data. We believe that SCAD will be a useful resource for scholars across multiple disciplines as well as for the policy community.