database of the armed conflict in colombia,

Médecins Sans Frontières provides mental health services in areas of active conflict in Colombia and using data from these services we aimed to establish which characteristics of the conflict are most associated with specific symptoms of mental ill health.

Although it is well established in post-conflict populations that experience of organised violence has a negative impact on mental health, little research has been done on those living in active conflict zones. The map presents a heat map displaying a higher intensity color range in areas concentrating a higher density of armed actors.Despite the fact that the Colombian armed conflict has continued for almost five decades there is still very little information on how it affects the mental health of civilians. The exact location of the incidents at the XY coordinate level is unknown, so the researchers assigned the coordinates of the municipality center to their respective observation. The result of the coding process is a database of armed actors geo-located at the municipality-year level.Įach data point in the database represents one observation of an armed actor in a given municipality-year as detected in the Noche y Niebla narratives. To do so, the software relies on dictionaries of actors and locations. The software reads the text of the Noche y Niebla narratives in order to identify the actors and places mentioned in the text. threats, rape, beatings, torture, forced displacement, arson, killings, etc.). These narratives provide a brief but detailed account of violent incidents covering a broad range of actions (e.g. The raw information comes from Noche y Niebla, a systematic and encompassing collection of human rights violations narratives provided by CINEP. To generate the database of Violent Presence of Armed Actors, the project relies on the computerized identification of actors and locations using Eventus ID (Osorio & Reyes 2016). These main actors are further disaggregated in a variety of specific organizations. For this particular research, the main types of armed actors include: government forces, insurgent organizations, paramilitary groups, and criminal organizations. The term Armed Actor refers to state and non-state armed entities that exercise the organized use of violence in a specific territory to achieve political or economic goals.

This visualization presents an interactive heat map of armed actors in Colombia based on ViPAA data.

Database of the armed conflict in colombia,