Violence In North Research Articles

Urban-Rural Geographies of Political Violence in North and West Africa

ABSTRACT This paper assesses the relationship between population density and political violence within North and West Africa. We find that while most violence currently occurs in rural areas, it also exhibits a classic distance-decay effect, commonly occurring near urbanized places. Regional differences are evident as Jihadist-led violence is increasingly rural in West Africa while urban violence was more common in North Africa. Important difference in states with major conflict are also present, exemplified by urbanized violence in Nigeria and rural violence in Mali. Our findings therefore provide mixed evidence for the typical “urbanization of conflict” discourse in the literature.

Urban-Rural Geographies of Political Violence in North and West Africa

Urban-Rural Geographies of Political Violence in North and West Africa

Mixed method analysis of violence in North and West Africa

Borders and Conflicts in North and West Africa. Eds. Marie Trémolières, Olivier J. Walther, and Steven M. Radil. West African Studies. – Paris: OECD Publishing, 2022. 128 p.

COMMUNAL VIOLENCE AND THE EXTREMITY OF POVERTY AMONG RURAL FARMERS IN THE NORTH – CENTRAL REGION OF NIGERIA

The increasing spate of communal violence in North – Central region of Nigeria has taken a very high toll on lives and livelihoods and had displaced several people. These resultantly had exacerbated the level of vulnerability, food/economic insecurity, destitution, extreme deprivation and misery in the region especially among the rural farmers thereby exposing them to extreme poverty. This paper focuses therefore on examining the effects of communal violence on rural poverty, the extent to which communal violence has extremely impoverished the rural populace in the North – Central region of Nigeria and ways of minimising its spate. Data for the study was sourced from 405 respondents across the region using questionnaire method. Findings of the study identified the effects of communal violence to include: wanton destruction of human lives, property and other sources of livelihood, psychological trauma, food and health insecurity as well as displacement of small – holder rural farmers, making their living standards miserable and deplorable thereby increasing very extremely the rate of poverty in the area by 85 per cent. The paper therefore recommends immediate trial of perpetrators of violence, conflict management and peace studies and poverty alleviation as actionable solutions.
 
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The Diffusion and Permeability of Political Violence in North and West Africa

ABSTRACT This article explores the spatial and temporal diffusion of political violence in North and West Africa by endeavoring to represent a group leader's mental landscape as he contemplates strategic targeting. We assume that this representation is a combination of the physical and social geography of the target environment, and the mental and physical cost of following a seemingly random pattern of attacks. Focusing on the distance and time between attacks and taking into consideration the transaction costs that state boundaries impose, we wish to understand what constrains a group leader to attack at a location other than the one that would yield the greatest overt payoff. We leverage functional data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED) dataset that catalogs violent extremist incidents in North and West Africa since 1997 to generate a network whose nodes are administrative regions. These nodes are connected by edges of qualitatively different types: undirected edges representing geographic distance, undirected edges incorporating the costs of crossing borders, and directed edges representing consecutive attacks by the same group. We analyze the resulting network using spectral embedding techniques that are able to account fully for the different types of edges. The result is a representation of North and West Africa that depicts its empirical permeability to violence. A better understanding of how location, time, and borders condition attacks enables planning, prepositioning, and response.

Political Fragmentation and Alliances among Armed Non-state Actors in North and Western Africa (1997–2014)

ABSTRACTDrawing on a collection of open source data, the article uses network analysis to represent alliances and conflicts among 179 organizations involved in violence in North and Western Africa between 1997 and 2014. Owing to the fundamentally relational nature of internecine violence, this article investigates the way the structural positions of conflicting parties affect their ability to resort to political violence. To this end, we combine two spectral embedding techniques that have previously been considered separately: one for directed graphs that takes into account the direction of relationships between belligerents, and one for signed graphs that takes into consideration whether relationships between groups are positive or negative. We hypothesize that groups with similar allies and foes have similar patterns of aggression. In a region where alliances are fluid and actors often change sides, the propensity to use political violence corresponds to a group’s position in the social network.

Surgery as a public health intervention: common misconceptions versus the truth

The world’s attention has recently been focused on the escalation of violence in north and west Africa. Daily reports of deaths and injuries from the region have raised concerns. What is missing from the picture, however, is the fact that many of these countries lack surgical capacity to treat the injured, and this inability to provide surgical care is contributing to a significant rise in the death toll. A recent World Health Organization (WHO) study found that more than 90% of deaths from injuries occur in low- and middle-income countries.1 This is not surprising, considering that the poorest third of the world’s population receives only 3.5% of the surgical operations undertaken worldwide.2 Many hospitals in these countries do not have a reliable supply of clean water, oxygen, electricity and anaesthetics, making it extremely challenging to perform even the most basic surgical operations.3

Blurring the Color Line: Black Freedom, Passing, Abolitionism, and Irish Ethnicity in Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends

BLURRING THE COLOR LINE: BLACK FREEDOM, PASSING, ABOLITIONISM, AND IRISH ETHNICITY IN FRANK J. WEBB'S THE GARIESAND THEIR FRIENDS Robert Nowatzki Ball State University One of the most intriguing scenes in Frank J. Webb's 1857 The Garies and Their Friends, a novel that focuses on African-Americans and a biracial family in antebellum Philadelphia, depicts the racechanges forced upon the wicked white racist George Stevens.1 Shortly before the race riot that he is orchestrating, a fire company gang beats him up and tars him; a group of drunken white men then ridicules him and smears him white with lime. This scene encapsulates Webb's attempt to problematize notions of racial identity and racial difference in the novel. By positing race as a fluid category that is intertwined with class and that white racists worked to stabilize, Webb's novel anticipates recent theoretical discussions about the constructed nature of race. The novel's critique of racial categories and racism, along with the fact that it is the second novel by an African-American, makes it one of the most interesting works ofnineteenth-century American fiction.2 It is also one of the first novels to represent the ambiguous social status of Irish immigrants as well as racial prejudice and urban violence in the antebellum North during the turbulent Jacksonian period.3 Of the limited scholarship dealing with Webb's novel, most focuses on biographical information; black domesticity, communalism, and reform activism; Christian hypocrisy; sentimentalism; and realism. There is surprisingly little analysis of how The Garies deconstructs definitions of racial categories .4 In this essay I argue that Webb's depiction of prosperous Northern blacks, mulattoes, white abolitionists, and Irish immigrants in The Gariesdisrupts the racial ideologies ofnative-born white Americans . The novel further questions how whites racially define themselves and others by pointing out the often conflicting paradigms of racial categorization—skin tone, dress, class status, reputation, and ancestry—and by suggesting that a white person's whiteness can be undermined when that person marries a black person, is labeled as an abolitionist, or is physically blackened with tar. Despite this racial fluidity, however, the novel also emphasizes the power of white racists in resisting this instability by categorizing racially ambiguous characters as inescapably "black" and inferior. 30Robert Nowatzki The notion of blackness as a fixed category of identity inferior to whiteness drives much of the violence and social ostracism depicted in The Garies: it causes the deaths of a white man, his biracial wife, their stillborn baby, and their son as well as the mutilation and derangement of their black neighbor. More positively, The Garies offers a sympathetic, detailed depiction of free African-Americans working together to battle prejudice and violence in the North, subjects that were familiar to Webb as a native of Philadelphia. Webb's focus on free blacks and racism in the North held little appeal for Northern white readers; in this sense it resembles Harriet E. Wilson's 1859 novel Our Nig, another novel that exposed Northern racism and sank into obscurity. Webb's depiction of Northern white racism, along with the fact that the novel was published in England, suggests that Northern whites were not his intended audience.5 Lacking an audience in the United States, The Gariesfailed to pose an effective challenge to popular notions of race in general as well as to derogatory perceptions and representations of African Americans that proscribed their social positions and opportunities. The Garies chronicles the lives of the white Clarence Garie, his mulatto wife (and former slave) Emily, and their children (also named Clarence and Emily) after their migration from Georgia to Philadelphia . Webb also includes a "passing" plot early in the novel that features Emily's mulatto cousin George Winston. The Garies befriend their industrious African-American neighbors the Ellises and the wealthy black landlord Mr. Walters, but they run afoul oftheir neighbor George Stevens, an unscrupulous lawyer who organizes a race riot and pressures an Irishman named McCloskey participate in the attack . Shortly before the attack, Stevens suffers the painful racechange experience mentioned above. During the riot, the Ellis family takes refuge in the home of Walters and aid his armed resistance to...