Urban Social Disorder 3.0: A global, city-level event dataset of political mobilization and disorder

Henry Thomson, Karim Bahgat, Henrik Urdal, Halvard Buhaug

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

The world’s population is increasingly concentrated in cities. Research on urbanization’s implications for peace and security has been hampered by a lack of comparable data on political mobilization and violence at the city level across space and through time, however. Urban Social Disorder 3.0 is a detailed event dataset covering 186 national capitals and major urban centers from 1960 to 2014. It includes 12 types of nonviolent and violent events, detailing the actors involved and their targets, start and end dates of each event, and the number of participants and deaths. We provide an overview of the main features of these data, and trends in urban social disorder across space and time. We demonstrate the utility of the dataset by analyzing the relationship between city size and the frequency of lethal disorder events. We find a positive relationship between city population and lethal urban social disorder, unlike previous studies. These new data raise promising avenues for future research on democratization; climate change and food security; and spillovers between different forms of mobilization and violence.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)521-531
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of Peace Research
Volume60
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2023

Keywords

  • cities
  • disorder
  • mobilization
  • unrest
  • urban social disorder

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Sociology and Political Science
  • Safety Research
  • Political Science and International Relations

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Urban Social Disorder 3.0: A global, city-level event dataset of political mobilization and disorder'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this