Hugh Pope

A new year, a new organization, a new job! I feel very lucky and wish everyone a wonderful new start in 2024 as well.

From today, I’m joining ACLED, the pre-eminent global researchers, analysts and publishers of data on political violence. I’ll be Chief of External Affairs, coordinating public-facing workstreams like publishing, communications and direct organizational outreach.

The new role is part of the rapid expansion of ACLED – short for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project – as its unique database of conflict events gains traction with strategists, policy-makers and assessors of risk. The dataset was started just 18 years ago by the chief executive Clionadh Raleigh, also professor of political violence and geography at Sussex University, as part of her PhD work on six West African countries. She and executive director Olivia Russell have now presided over ACLED’s growth to cover all of the world’s 243 states and territories.

That now includes the United States. In fact, ACLED’s most recent publication Riding the Tide: the Shifting Identity of the Proud Boys since the Capitol riot profiles that country’s far-right groups ahead of elections in November. ACLED data shows exactly how groups like the Proud Boys are on the up and the Oath Keepers are down, and how the Proud Boys jump opportunistically onto far-right political bandwagons: for instance, first demonstrating in support of Trump in 2020-2021, then against abortion in early 2022, and then mainly anti-LGBTQ+ in late 2022-2023.

On top of widening and deepening its rich treasure chest of data, ACLED now wants to build up its presentation of what it finds, its own analysis of what it means, its support for data literacy and its reputation beyond its home audience in the data elite. I’ve already had fun meeting my new colleagues while working part-time over the past several months, even if I do now feel somewhat daunted by the challenges of my first fully remote workplace: some 250 collaborators in 50 countries all over the world and not a single office.

As we build up our young communications department, we are hiring, too, so do check out the careers section of ACLED’s website. If you or anyone you know would like to help us to spread the word about how policy and other decisions can be made better if based on what’s actually happening on the ground, please do apply or encourage others to do so!

My new job brings to a close a delightful two-year sabbatical after my 15 years with the International Crisis Group. I spent much of the time editing and getting published my late Dad’s long-lost book on The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power. I was also fortunate to be inducted into the world of sortition-based democratic reform, which actually has great potential for defusing conflicts too. (Above is a picture after a presentation of the book in Belfast in October with Art O’Leary, the Irish government’s electoral commission chief, Polish academic Joanna Podgorska-Rykoka and Trinity College Dublin sortition expert Peter Stone). I will be unable to stop myself blogging from time to time about breakthroughs in the use of groups of randomly selected citizens to deliberate and take decisions in the public interest.

But for now, at least, it’s back to trying to understand armed conflict and, I hope, helping people find new ways to make the world a more peaceful place.

Happy New Year!