# How to read the Political Violence Map

> A field guide to risk bands, UCDP violence types, and humanitarian context on politicalviolencemap.com. App-derived labels are not ACLED or UCDP measurements.

This page is the HTML twin of https://politicalviolencemap.com/reading/

## What the map shows

The map is a country-level **situation monitor**. Each watchlist row is a state or territory, not a named front. Color is a display choice: risk band, a seed fatality or civilian-targeting field, internally displaced people, or an app-derived trend label.

## Risk bands are app labels

Extreme, High, Elevated, Monitor, and Low Visibility are **derived** by this publication to order the watchlist. They are not ACLED Conflict Index ranks and must not be cited as such. ACLED publishes four ranked dimensions — deadliness, danger to civilians, geographic diffusion, and armed-group fragmentation — described in [About the Conflict Index](https://acleddata.com/general-guide/about-conflict-index). In this MVP seed those rank fields are `null` until a live import exists.

## UCDP violence types

The Uppsala Conflict Data Program classifies organized violence as:

- **State-based** — a government is a party to the fighting.
- **Non-state** — organized groups fight each other without the state as a party.
- **One-sided** — organized actors attack civilians.

See the [UCDP Dataset Download Center](https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/). The dashboard’s “primary violence type” label is inferred from which of those flags are active. It is a display convenience, not a UCDP codebook field.

## Humanitarian fields

Internal displacement, refugee outflow, people in need, and IPC Phase 3+ share come from IDMC, UNHCR, OCHA, and the IPC — when present. Treat seed figures as rounded placeholders. Confirm current estimates with those agencies.

## What not to do

- Do not add the seed fatality column across countries and call the sum a global death toll.
- Do not present trend arrows or 8-week sparklines as ACLED time series.
- Do not treat editorial actor lists or named theaters as an order of battle.