Sezibra/conflict-event-analysis

Spatial and temporal analysis of violence against civilians during the Tigray conflict (2020-2022). UCDP GED data, DBSCAN clustering, geopandas visualization. # Conflict Event Data Analysis and Geospatial Visualization ## Research Question How does violence against civilians cluster spatially and temporally during the Tigray conflict (November 2020 to November 2022)? ## Navigation | Section | Description | |---------|-------------| | Motivation | Why disaggregated conflict event analysis matters | | Key Findings | Main results across all analyses | | Data | UCDP GED v25.1 filtered to 1,764 Ethiopia events | | Methods | EDA, geospatial visualization, DBSCAN clustering | | Results in Detail | Figures and interpretation for each analytical step | | Notebooks | Analytical progression | | How to Reproduce | Setup and replication instructions | | References | Academic sources | ## Motivation Conflict research increasingly depends on disaggregated, geocoded event data. Datasets like UCDP GED and ACLED now record individual events of organized violence with precise coordinates, dates, actors, and fatality estimates. This granularity allows researchers to move beyond country-level analysis toward spatially and temporally explicit studies of how violence unfolds within conflicts. The Tigray conflict (November 2020 to November 2022) is a strong case for this approach. The conflict involved multiple armed actors (Ethiopian federal forces, Eritrean forces, TPLF, Amhara militias), shifted geographically across three regions, and produced distinct phases with different patterns of violence against civilians. This project applies spatial analysis and density-based clustering to identify where and when civilian targeting concentrated, which actors were responsible, and how violence shifted as the conflict evolved. ## Key Findings **Violence against civilians was extensive.** 554 events of one-sided violence resulted in an estimated 9,324 civilian deaths over two years. This accounts for 31% of all conflict events in Ethiopia during the study period. **Government forces committed the majority of documented civilian targeting.** T …