Event categories & story themes — at a glance
Every Event in GDELT Cloud carries a structured classification so you can filter, route, and reason over global news the same way an analyst does. Three lenses sit on top of the article stream: Conflict events (ACLED-style), CAMEO+ events across ten structural domains, and Stories — daily clusters with scope and theme tags.
Conflict events
Battles, protests, riots, explosions, violence against civilians, and strategic developments — coded with a 3-level hierarchy.
CAMEO+ events
Politics, crime, economy, corporate, technology, infrastructure, environment, health, demographics, and information — the structural signals behind geopolitics and markets.
Story clusters
Stories aggregate articles into a single narrative per day, tagged with scope (local → international) and a thematic category bucket.
Political violence, demonstrations & strategic developments
Each conflict event is coded with a 3-level hierarchy — disorder type → event type → sub-event type — plus actor pair, geography, fatalities, and a Goldstein-style cooperation/conflict reading. We follow the ACLED codebook independently; we don't license or redistribute ACLED data.
Political violence
Armed conflict, attacks, explosions, and targeted violence by armed actors.
Armed combat between organized groups.
Attacks using weapons that allow distance between attacker and target.
Deliberate violence by armed actors targeting unarmed non-combatants.
Demonstrations
Organized protests, riots, and crowd-driven violence.
Organized demonstrations.
Collective violence, often spontaneous.
Strategic developments
Concrete actions that change the conflict landscape without a battle.
Confirmed structural changes — agreements, arrests, base establishment, territorial handovers.
Each event records up to two actors with normalized type codes 1–8: state forces, rebel groups, political militias, identity militias, rioters, protesters, civilians, and external/other forces. The interaction field encodes the pair as a normalized label like State forces–Rebel groups or Protesters only.
Country (ISO-3) is always present. Region, admin1, admin2, named place, and decimal lat/lng narrow further when the source supports it. A geo_precision code (1–3) tells you whether the location is exact, approximate, or only known at the province level.
Beyond conflict — the structural signals that move geopolitics & markets
CAMEO+ extends the classic CAMEO political-event taxonomy and ACLED conflict layer into the structural domains that shape geopolitics, markets, and instability — economic shocks, corporate moves, technology jumps, infrastructure events, climate hazards, public health, demographic flows, and the information space.
Political interaction
Diplomatic, cooperative, verbal-conflict, and non-violent coercive political events
- 01MAKE PUBLIC STATEMENT
- 02APPEAL
- 03EXPRESS INTENT TO COOPERATE
- 04CONSULT
- 05ENGAGE IN DIPLOMATIC COOPERATION
- 06ENGAGE IN MATERIAL COOPERATION
- 07PROVIDE AID
- 08YIELD
- 09INVESTIGATE
- 10DEMAND
- 11DISAPPROVE
- 12REJECT
- 13THREATEN (non-military)
- 15EXHIBIT FORCE POSTURE
- 16REDUCE RELATIONS
- 17COERCE (non-violent)
Crime and justice
Ordinary crime, criminal justice, policing, trafficking, organized crime, and custody events
- CR01HOMICIDE OR VIOLENT CRIME
- CR02SEXUAL VIOLENCE OR EXPLOITATION
- CR03KIDNAPPING OR ABDUCTION
- CR04ROBBERY BURGLARY OR THEFT
- CR05FRAUD OR FINANCIAL CRIME
- CR06NARCOTICS TRAFFICKING OR SMUGGLING
- CR07ORGANIZED CRIME OR GANG ACTIVITY
- CR08ARREST CHARGE CONVICTION OR SENTENCING
- CR09PRISON JAILBREAK OR CUSTODY INCIDENT
- CR10POLICE INVESTIGATION OR OPERATION
Economic structure
Macroeconomic, monetary, fiscal, trade, capital flow, and market stress events
- EC01MACROECONOMIC INDICATOR RELEASE
- EC02MONETARY POLICY ACTION
- EC03FISCAL POLICY ACTION
- EC04TRADE POLICY ACTION
- EC05MARKET STRESS EVENT
- EC06CURRENCY EVENT
- EC07SOVEREIGN DEBT EVENT
Industrial capacity
Corporate structure, production, technology development, and capital allocation events
- CO01MERGER OR ACQUISITION
- CO02BANKRUPTCY OR RESTRUCTURING
- CO03PRODUCTION CAPACITY CHANGE
- CO04TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT MILESTONE
- CO05CAPITAL ALLOCATION EVENT
- CO06REGULATORY OR LEGAL ACTION
- CO07LEADERSHIP OR GOVERNANCE CHANGE
- CO08SUPPLY CHAIN SHOCK
Technology power
AI capability, military tech, cyber, space, and strategic technology control events
- TE01AI CAPABILITY EVENT
- TE02MILITARY TECHNOLOGY EVENT
- TE03CYBER EVENT
- TE04SPACE OR SATELLITE EVENT
- TE05STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGY CONTROL
- TE06CRITICAL TECH INFRASTRUCTURE
Infrastructure
Energy, transport, supply chain, communications, and water infrastructure events, including strategic buildout milestones
- IN01ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE EVENT
- IN02TRANSPORT DISRUPTION
- IN03SUPPLY CHAIN DISRUPTION
- IN04COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE
- IN05DELIBERATE INFRASTRUCTURE SABOTAGE
- IN06WATER INFRASTRUCTURE EVENT
Environmental shocks
Geophysical hazards, meteorological events, climate events, and environmental pollution
- EN01GEOPHYSICAL HAZARD
- EN02METEOROLOGICAL HAZARD
- EN03CLIMATE EVENT
- EN04ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION EVENT
- EN05ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY OR AGREEMENT
Public health
Epidemic outbreaks, pandemics, vaccine milestones, health policy, and system crises
- HE01DISEASE OUTBREAK
- HE02PANDEMIC OR GLOBAL HEALTH EMERGENCY
- HE03VACCINE OR TREATMENT MILESTONE
- HE04PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY ACTION
- HE05HEALTH SYSTEM CRISIS
Demographic structure
Refugee flows, migration events, population crises, and labor events
- DE01MASS DISPLACEMENT OR REFUGEE EVENT
- DE02MIGRATION EVENT
- DE03POPULATION CRISIS
- DE04LABOR EVENT
- DE05URBANIZATION OR HOUSING EVENT
Information space
Disinformation campaigns, information control, major leaks, and narrative warfare
- IF01DISINFORMATION OR INFLUENCE OPERATION
- IF02INFORMATION CONTROL ACTION
- IF03MAJOR LEAK OR DISCLOSURE
- IF04NARRATIVE WARFARE EVENT
Numbers that turn events into signals
Beyond the categorical taxonomy, every event carries domain-aware numeric metrics. Together they let you score, rank, and route events into agentic workflows — from market-impact alerts to humanitarian briefings.
Cooperation-to-conflict spectrum for political and conflict events. Negative is conflictual, positive is cooperative.
Domain-specific severity. For economic events, 10 is a sovereign default; for environment, a major catastrophe; for technology, a frontier capability jump.
How many states, populations, or sectors the event materially affects. Cross-border crises rate higher.
Speed and likelihood of cascading effects — viral disinformation, cyber events, and supply-chain shocks rate highest.
How much the event tends to move financial markets. Macro and policy actions dominate; cultural events rate low.
Daily article clusters with scope & theme
A Story is a daily cluster of articles that converge on a single narrative. Stories carry a free-text label, a scope band (how widely the narrative is being covered), and a thematic category drawn from the same structural domains as Events. Story categories are emitted by the clustering layer — they're not a fixed enum, but cluster around recurring buckets.
Each Story is tagged with one of four geographic scope bands. Use scope to filter for breaking-local versus internationally-covered narratives.
A single city or sub-national area, with sources rooted to that place.
Coverage spans a single country and its national press.
A multi-country region — e.g. the Sahel, the Levant, Southeast Asia.
Major outlets across multiple regions are converging on the story.
Categories are not a closed list — the clustering layer can emit fresh labels for novel narratives — but most stories land in one of these recurring buckets.
Stories link back to the Events generated from their cluster — so you can pivot from a structured Conflict or CAMEO+ event into the article-level evidence that produced it, and out again into the cluster of related stories that touched on the same narrative.
Build with the same taxonomy your analysts already use
Sign up for an API key in minutes. The same fields you see here are filterable on every endpoint — events, stories, entities, and the agent surface.