Politics, conflict and security are domains of human activity and fields of study that still mostly resist the onslought of quant, let alone big, data.
Some fields, like insurance or stock market trading, lend themselves to quantitative analysis nicely.
But politics is way too messy for that. Lots of noise, lots of activity which is difficult to categorize and measure in spreadsheets.
But times are changing. There is already an existing body of academic, mostly historical research.
For example, if you're interested in civil wars, unhappy phenomena as they are, you'll find a meta-study of nearly 50 quant studies on the topic. And the meta-study itself was already published in 2009.
What remains difficult is to find the following...
ACLED is great, for all its limitations.
Uppsala looks like it is lagging one year behind events but you can get almost real-time if you look for monthly updates.
This database is commercial.
Focus on terrorism and insurgency.
GTD is focused only at terrorism and for free up to 2019. But you can pay for 2020 update.