ACLED-Religion repression in MENA

LONDON - Between January 2021 and March 2022, the ACLED-Religion pilot project collected and published real-time data on religious repression and disorder in seven countries in the Middle East and North Africa: Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, and Yemen. With the addition of historical back-coding data for 2020, ACLED-Religion recorded nearly 14,600 religious repression and disorder events in total, including over 6,100 harassment events, over 5,200 political violence events, and over 1,500 demonstration events, as well as over 2,000 strategic developments.

As a pilot project, ACLED-Religion was created to test the potential for real-time data collection on religious repression and disorder and determine avenues for future research. Marking the end of the pilot period, this final capstone report breaks down the full dataset for each country and presents critical reflections on the methodological challenges that emerged during the pilot, outlining the coding decisions and sourcing strategies that ACLED adopted in order to better capture religious repression and disorder. It concludes with an overview of lessons learned that can inform programming that aims to build on the results of the project going forward.

This final report explores the main trends in repression and disorder observed in each country covered by ACLED-Religion. Additionally, it presents critical reflections on the methodological challenges that emerged during the pilot project, outlining the coding decisions and sourcing strategies that ACLED adopted to capture religious repression and disorder.

Religious Repression and Disorder Trends

Between January 2020 and March 2022, ACLED-Religion records over 6,800 religious disorder events, mostly concentrated in four countries: Iraq (3,228 events, 47%), Palestine (1,363 events, 20%), Yemen (1,134 events, 17%), and Egypt (737 events, 11%) (see graph below). In each of these countries, the acts of a few religion-based actors drove the most significant religious disorder trends: in Iraq and Egypt, the vast majority of disorder events involved interactions between government forces and the Islamic State; in Palestine, most events involved Israeli settlers and Palestinian rioters; and, in Yemen, most disorder events involved Islah and Houthi forces targeting civilians.

To download the full report, visit: https://acleddata.com/2022/04/28/coding-religious-repression-and-disorder-outcomes-and-critical-reflections-from-the-acled-religion-pilot-project/