About GReVD
The Consortium
Resources
In November 2018, SIPRI and the Brookings Institution convened a small group of experts to discuss the challenges of measuring and monitoring “Irregular Political Violence” - a phenomenon that seems to be on the rise in the form of increased grey zone conflicts and hybrid wars, proliferation of armed groups and increasingly manifesting as political violence that is not organized as warfare.
During that discussion, the participants acknowledged the challenges of tracking disparate forms of violence as they often fall “between” other forms of violence - between intentional homicides, terrorism and conflict-related deaths, tracked by members of GReVD. Indeed, it was acknowledged that many non-state actors seem to be adapting their tactics and using forms of violence specifically that are not recorded/monitored globally to stay “below the radar”. Further, the disparity between the quality of global administrative data and that collected by expert monitoring groups was acknowledged.
This was a timely discussion, as one of the biggest challenges for monitoring progress on SDG 16, Target 1, Significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere, is the difficulty of tracking “related death rates everywhere”. In this meeting, the experts agreed on the importance of unified global monitoring of violent death rates as a first step toward improved monitoring of SDG16.1 for 2030.
The concept of a Global Registry of Violent Deaths was borne out of this meeting and started to take form in early 2019, in advance of the lead up to the High-Level Political Forum on SDG 16 in June. With early support from UKAID, two workshops in Washington DC and Geneva (February 2019) fed into a stocktaking of the current state of knowledge, which was captured in a Gaps Report.
The consortium has grown to 12 members, with endorsements from other organizations. These institutions and the growing network connected to GReVD collectively represent the leading global expertise on monitoring violent deaths.
Funding from the Swedish Postcode Foundation has made this growth possible by supporting combined research initiatives, collective problem-solving on coding issues and the collection of data to populate the Registry.
In addition, UK Aid has supported the Gaps Report. Research time has also been supported by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The consortium has made a collective commitment to developing the infrastructure to record the time and location of every violent death. This challenging task will take some years to complete, at which point policymakers, researchers, politicians, journalists, activists and citizens will all have the data needed to know where the worst violence is occuring, what the trends in violent deaths are, and be able to better assess approaches to reducing violence.