Philosopher George Santayana wrote those words 100 years ago, between two massively destructive world wars. Unfortunately, they continue to ring true today amidst a growing global epidemic of political and civil conflict. That epidemic takes many different forms—wars between countries, civil wars, brutally violent conflicts among armed gangs, large-scale terrorism, government-sanctioned ethnic cleansing—but the terrible consequences for civilians are the same.  And, more and more people in more and more places are caught up in extreme violence.

What happened to the “peace dividend” after the end of the Cold War? Or the optimism of scholars like Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari who expected mankind’s “better angels” to produce peace and prosperity? Did the Age of Aquarius already come and go?

Clionadh Raleigh believes it is important to understand and document the nature and extent of violent global civil conflict. She founded and leads ACLED, Armed Conflict Location and Events Data and is a professor of political violence and geography at the University of Sussex. Listen as she describes the world as it actually is.

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ABOUT OUR GUEST
Prof. Clionadh Raleigh created ACLED while writing her PhD in 2005. Since 2014, ACLED has operated as a non-profit, non-governmental organization in the United States. While guiding the development of ACLED, she is also Professor of Political Violence and Geography in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex in the UK. Clionadh’s areas of expertise include the dynamics of conflict and violence, changing patterns of political violence and conflict data. Her work has also focused on African political environments and elite networks, and she has largely concentrated on subnational power dynamics and their influence on violent movements. In her intensive in-country research, she has engaged with questions on environmental change and violence patterns, and more recently, has developed new measures of civilian exposure to violence.