The widely used PRIO-GRID data framework has been awarded the prestigious J. David Singer Data Innovation Award.
The Singer Award is given to ‘the best data contribution to the study of any and all forms of political conflict, either within or between nation-states’. The biennial award is granted by the Conflict Processes Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA).
PRIO-GRID provides open access to bespoke geographical data in a harmonized grid format to facilitate spatial data management and analysis. It consists of quadratic grid cells that jointly cover all terrestrial areas of the world. Each grid cell contains cell-specific information on armed conflicts, socio-economic conditions, ethnic groups, physical attributes, climatic conditions and more. All PRIO-GRID code is open source.
'The PRIO-GRID data framework has been downloaded by users more than 20,000 times since its release in the Journal of Peace Research in 2012,' said Research Professor Halvard Buhaug, who is a member of the PRIO-GRID team. 'We're pleased to see that it continues to inform scientific research across and beyond the social sciences.'
Research Professor Scott Gates and Senior Researcher Andreas Forø Tollefsen accepted the prize on behalf of the PRIO-GRID team at the 2025 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition in Vancouver 11–14 September.
Version 2.0 of PRIO-GRID is available at grid.prio.org, and you can follow the development of the the latest and upcoming PRIO-GRID 3.0 version on PRIO's GitHub.
