Urban Social Disorder 3.0: A global, city-level event dataset of political mobilization and disorder
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221082991 |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Special Data Features |
Special Data Features
Urban Social Disorder 3.0: A global,
city-level event dataset of political
mobilization and disorder
Henry Thomson
School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona
State University
Karim Bahgat
College of William & Mary
Henrik Urdal
Peace Research Institute Oslo
Halvard Buhaug
Peace Research Institute Oslo
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.
Keywords
cities, disorder, mobilization, unrest, urban social disorder
Introduction
For the first time, more people now live in cities than in
rural areas. By 2050, rural–urban migration in the devel-
oping world will take the global urbanization rate to over
70% (United Nations, 2018). While urbanization is
generally linked with increasing living standards (World
Bank,2016),itisnolongersynonymouswithrapid
economic growth, generating concerns about premature
deindustrialization, poverty, and inequality (Gollin,
Jedwab & Vollrath, 2016). Scholars are also critically
reassessing the consequences of contemporary urban
growth for democracy in the developing world (Glaeser
& Steinberg, 2017; Post, 2018).
As the world’s population becomes increasingly con-
centrated in urban areas, so too do political mobilization
and violence. Unlike conventional forms of armed
conflict, which have been in long-term decline (Petters-
son & O
¨berg, 2020), urban social disorder is becoming
more prevalent, and there is an upward trend in lethal
urban violence (Bahgat, Buhaug & Urdal, 2018). This
trend threatens to continue in future decades (Gold-
stone, 2010) and has attracted the attention of policy-
makers: the United Nations included urban security in
both the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals and the
2016 Habitat New Urban Agenda.
However, empirical research on urban mobilization
and violence has been hampered by a lack of data with
a broad geographic and temporal scope. Existing efforts
to collect detailed information on conflict events, such as
Corresponding author:
henry.thomson@asu.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(3) 521–531
ªThe Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221082991
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