Jay Ulfelder on the newest revision of the Center for Systemic Peace's dataset on political violence:
Consistent with other measures, CSP’s data show an increase in violent political conflict in the past few years. At the same time, those data also indicate that, even at the end of 2014, the scale of conflict worldwide remained well below the peak levels observed in the latter decades of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath.
Be sure to klick through to Jay's article. I'd be interested to see the same graph for African countries.
Source: An Updated Look at Trends in Political Violence | Dart-Throwing Chimp