How can the conflict prevention community respond to disappearing data and funding cuts?

As global insecurity intensifies, the infrastructure that underpins conflict prevention is under pressure. Traditional donor funding is shrinking. As a result, open-access data is increasingly restricted, and key humanitarian and peacebuilding efforts are losing support. Participants examined how the sector can build resilience, protect critical data, and adapt to a more fragmented and commercially dominated environment.

Participants identified key challenges currently being faced by the conflict prevention community:

• Cuts to long-term initiatives, such as those monitoring climate-related drivers of conflict or the rights of minority groups, are eroding the data infrastructure that underpins early warning systems. Shifting donor priorities have also caused UN agencies to lose access to core datasets, while peacekeeping, humanitarian disarmament, and post-conflict programming face growing resistance from host governments and declining international financing.
• Most high-quality data is owned or controlled by a small number of companies, making access expensive, fragmented, and dependent on the commercial interests of a few private actors.
• Social media platforms have begun to restrict access to data and raise costs for researchers. Platforms such as Meta have shut down scraping and research tools, while others like TikTok block scraping or offer no academic access. Satellite and geospatial data, crucial for conflict monitoring, often remains low-resolution or behind high paywalls.
• There are concerns over ‘single points of failure’ if key conflict datasets (for example, ACLED or UCDP) lose funding or become unavailable. At the same time, participants expressed concern that focusing on few larger datasets and the organisations behind them restricts the kinds of questions NGOs can ask. Participants expressed the need to ensure that research teams compare approaches and try to combine data sets to answer different questions.
• Fragmentation and a lack of coordination between organisations leads to duplication of data collection. While separate data collection efforts by different actors can enable innovation as well as more fine-grained analysis of specific research questions, divergent methodologies and incompatible coding practices limit the ability to combine datasets or build shared insights. Additionally, funding competition between civil society organisations is a barrier to collaboration.
• Digital-only approaches to data collection miss local nuance. However, conflict and authoritarianism are making local data collection more dangerous, raising concerns about the safety of local actors and the reliability of on-the-ground data.

Despite these challenges, participants identified opportunities for resilience and capacity-building:

• Strengthen resilience in data infrastructure by diversifying funding sources and reducing reliance on single donors or datasets. Organisations should archive existing datasets to prevent loss from funding cuts or institutional changes. Prioritise critical functions in the data lifecycle – from collection to long-term storage.
• Improve collaboration and interoperability amongst the conflict prevention community by developing shared coding frameworks and transparency standards. Secondment opportunities can be promoted to build trust and capacity across organisations. The sector should also push for data to be interoperable and open-access by default.
• There is scope to engage more proactively with private actors, but this requires a clearer understanding of their commercial incentives and the development of shared standards.
• Protect and empower local partners, who can offer unique insight – particularly in authoritarian or conflict-affected areas, but need better protection and support. Encourage upward feeding of local data into broader, standardised systems.
• Adapt methodologies to do more with less. Train models to be able to judge data quality and use LLMs to filter and repurpose archived data. Improve training to strengthen triangulation and data literacy across the sector.

Participants identified longer-term goals for the sector to protect the data ecosystem:

• Support innovation while safeguarding independence. The funding crunch can be used as an opportunity to build more efficient and interoperable systems. Participants also suggested developing a charter of principles for responsible data use and a shared due diligence framework.
• Promote shared governance and collective action, such as by developing a humanitarian data exchange or pooled data platform. Encourage joint funding bids and cross-sector networks to increase sustainability.
• Reframe conflict data as critical infrastructure, essential not only for humanitarian aid but also for national security. Demonstrate the impact of data loss on forecasting, programming and crisis response, raising awareness of the shrinking space for conflict monitoring and peacebuilding. Coordinate with governments to encourage burden sharing and support open access to high-resolution and good-quality data.

This work was supported by UCL Innovation & Enterprise.

Author: Georgia Cole (Research Analyst, International Security Programme), with contributions from Manuel Vogt (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science).