The changing geography of conflict in North and West Africa

Abstract

Chapter 4 examines the changing geography of violent events and fatalities in North and West Africa since the late 1990s. Using disaggregated conflict data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project, the chapter shows that political violence has reached an all-time high in West Africa and considerably decreased in North Africa after the end of the Second Libyan civil war. In West Africa, the Spatial Conflict Dynamics Indicator (SCDi) confirms that 9% of the studied region is currently affected by violent events, compared with only 1% in 2009. Violence is still predominantly clustered and intense, but the proportion of areas that experience more diffuse forms of violence is increasing, a sign that conflicts are expanding to previously unaffected areas. Several clusters of violence have coalesced in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria, forming large conflict hotspots that transcend national boundaries. The SCDi also identifies two new hotspots of violence that are likely to expand in the coming years, one between Burkina Faso and its southern neighbours, and another in north-western Nigeria. Nowhere else in the world has one multistate region been affected by so many forms of violence, each with its own localised roots, progressively converging.