Advancing Communal Violence Research: Concept, Definition, and Measurement

Communal violence remains a pervasive yet understudied form of political violence, often overshadowed by civil wars and electoral conflicts. Although improvements in the quality and accessibility of event data have enabled more systematic and comparative research, significant biases and discrepancies persist. A key obstacle to advancing the field has been the lack of conceptual clarity and standardized coding practices, which hampers comparison of findings. We develop a crisp definition of communal violence and operationalize it with a novel keyword-based coding methodology. Drawing on fieldwork- generated knowledge, we foreground the practices, along with the issues, identities and actors involved. Hence, we focus not only on the ‘who’ but more importantly on the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of communal violence. Applying our method to the case of Nigeria, we generate new insights about the geography and trends of communal violence and their interaction with other forms of armed violence. Our findings underscore that dataset choice and coding rules can lead to rather different conclusions about the scale and impact of ‘local violence’. Our transparent and adaptable coding scheme offers a replicable framework for analyzing communal violence across diverse contexts and datasets.