Today, the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) released the beta version of PRIO-GRID 3.0, a major redevelopment of its widely used infrastructure for integrating and analyzing spatial data.
The new version turns the award-winning PRIO-GRID into a flexible, open-source R package that allows researchers not only to use harmonized spatial data, but also to integrate their own spatial datasets and build custom versions of PRIO-GRID tailored to their research needs.
“PRIO-GRID 3.0 takes us from primarily providing a ready-made dataset to providing a platform that the wider scientific community can use, adapt and contribute to,” said PRIO Senior Researcher Jonas Vestby.
The original PRIO-GRID was launched in 2012 as an open research infrastructure, designed to lower the barriers to subnational spatial research for social scientists. It took messy and mismatched geospatial data from diverse sources – including conflict events, population, climate, socioeconomic conditions and physical geography – and standardized them within one consistent grid.
Its global system of fixed grid cells provides a common spatial framework in which otherwise incompatible data can be combined. The standard PRIO-GRID divides the terrestrial world into cells measuring 0.5 × 0.5 decimal degrees – roughly 50 × 50 kilometres at the Equator. Unlike administrative units, these cells remain geographically stable when political and administrative boundaries change.
“This has made PRIO-GRID an invaluable tool for studying where conflict occurs, how violence interacts with environmental and socioeconomic conditions, and what the local consequences of conflict are for communities, economies and displacement,” said PRIO Senior Researcher Andreas Forø Tollefsen.
From dataset to research infrastructure
PRIO-GRID 3.0 takes the original idea considerably further.
Rather than primarily providing researchers with a predefined collection of variables, the new version provides the tools needed to collect, process and integrate spatial data within a common framework.
PRIO-GRID 3.0 is built as an open-source R package, with its development managed through Git and GitHub. Researchers can download the official PRIO-GRID release, but now they can also use the same infrastructure to create datasets suited to their own research questions.
Users can change the spatial resolution, geographical extent and map projection, for example, making it possible to investigate how analytical results depend on the choice of spatial unit or to construct datasets for particular regions.
The package also keeps track of metadata such as original data sources, licenses, citations and download locations. This makes it easier to document where variables come from and to properly credit the organizations and researchers who produced the underlying data.
Three generations of PRIO-GRID
The new release marks the third major generation of PRIO-GRID. PRIO-GRID 1.0, released in 2012, was built around GIS-based processing. PRIO-GRID 2.0, introduced in 2014, moved the infrastructure to the spatial database system PostGIS. With PRIO-GRID 3.0 Beta in 2026, the infrastructure moves to an open-source, R-based and version-controlled framework. “The technology has changed substantially, but the central objective has remained the same: making it easier to integrate diverse spatial data in a consistent and transparent way,” says Tollefsen. The development of PRIO-GRID over the years has been supported through several research projects funded by the Research Council of Norway, including Disaggregating the Study of Civil Wars and the Advanced Conflict Data Catalogue, and most recently through the Peace Science Infrastructure project.
Connecting conflict data with a rapidly changing data landscape
The redevelopment is particularly relevant as the amount and variety of spatial data available to social scientists continues to expand.
Remote sensing, for example, can provide detailed information about fires, destruction, vegetation or changes in human activity. But such signals are often difficult to interpret on their own. Their value increases when they can be systematically combined with information about conflict events, population, socioeconomic conditions, climate and other characteristics of the locations being studied.
PRIO-GRID provides a framework for this kind of data integration and triangulation.
It also reduces the need for individual researchers to repeatedly solve the same basic data-processing problems – finding data, downloading them, reconciling different formats and spatial resolutions, and documenting how the resulting variables were created.
The ambition is broader than maintaining a single dataset. PRIO-GRID is a research tool and shared infrastructure for spatial social science.
An established infrastructure entering a new phase
Since its first release, PRIO-GRID has become widely used in quantitative peace and conflict research and increasingly in other fields working with subnational spatial data. The original PRIO-GRID article has been cited hundreds of times, and PRIO-GRID data have been downloaded 10,000 times. In 2025, PRIO-GRID received the J. David Singer Data Innovation Award from the Conflict Processes Section of the American Political Science Association.
The development of PRIO-GRID 3.0 forms part of the Research Council of Norway-funded Peace Science Infrastructure (PSI) project. While PSI develops infrastructure for collecting and coding conflict data, PRIO-GRID provides the complementary framework for integrating these observations with other spatial information.
The 3.0.2 Beta release is now available for researchers to test and use. As a beta release, it also marks the beginning of a period in which feedback from users will help shape the further development of the infrastructure.
Researchers are encouraged to try the package, explore the documentation, report issues and suggest new data sources and variables.
Explore PRIO-GRID
R package and source code:
https://github.com/prio-data/priogrid
Documentation and tutorials: https://prio-data.github.io/priogrid/
Download PRIO-GRID data: https://www.prio.org/data/40
Suggest data sources, variables or report issues: https://github.com/prio-data/priogrid/issues
