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For decades, Plateau State in Nigeria's Middle Belt has witnessed repeated ethnoreligious violence. Over this period, both state and federal governments have established formal Commissions of Inquiry (COIs) in response to unrest, tasked with investigating violence, identifying perpetrators, and – ultimately – strengthening accountability. While commissions’ mandates and specific outcomes varied, there is general consensus that inquiries have been largely ineffective at securing justice or establishing accountability for violence. This study seeks to understand the expectations placed on, and role of, COIs in Plateau State as pathways to formal accountability in a context of recurring violence. We argue that COIs are embedded in the complex, multilevel networks and politics of state and non-state institutions. Civil society, in turn, has diverse expectations and demands, and articulates these in fragmented ways. As a result, COIs served primarily as another avenue for interest-based negotiations.

Violent conflict is the key driver in global food crises. In response, researchers, humanitarians and policy stakeholders have sought to better predict, analyse and respond to food crises in conflict-affected contexts. However, efforts to model conflict’s impacts on hunger typically focus on ‘conflict’ as an aggregate category, rarely distinguishing between violence that directly involves food and food systems from wider insecurity. This study proposes a narrower measure of ‘food-related violence (FRV),’ in which food and food systems feature in acts of political violence. The study asks: to what extent is FRV a driver of food crises? To answer, it develops a measure of disaggregated food-related violence from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset, then tests the comparative strength of the relationship between FRV and subsequent food crises in 16 Sub-Saharan African contexts, drawing on food security data from the Integrated Food Phase Classification system and Cadre Harmonisé. The analysis finds that FRV is more strongly correlated to subsequent food crisis than either general – or other subcategories of – violent events across the sample, pointing to the distinct profile of this modality of violence. The findings suggest that researchers, policymakers and practitioners seeking to understand and address the conflict–hunger nexus would benefit from integrating a measure of this specific modality of violence, as existing approaches with a broad focus on conflict-driven food crises may obscure the extent to which FRV, specifically, contributes to hunger.

This paper assesses the comparative opportunities and limitations of ‘new’ and ‘old’ data sources for early warning, crisis response and violence research by comparing reports of political violence, and both violent and peaceful demonstrations, produced through social media and traditional media during the Kenyan elections in August and October 2017. We leverage data from a sample of social media reports of violence through public posts to Twitter and compare these with events coded from media and published sources by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) along two dimensions: 1) geography of violence; and 2) temporality of reporting. We find that the profile of violence recorded varies significantly by source. Records from Twitter are more geographically concentrated, particularly in the capital city and wealthier areas. They are timelier in the immediate period surrounding elections. Records from ACLED have a wider geographic reach, and are relatively more numerous than Twitter in rural and less wealthy areas. They are timelier and more consistent in the run-up to and following elections. While neither source can reveal the ‘true’ violence that occurred, the findings point to the value of drawing on a constellation of various source types given their complementary advantages.

This article establishes a framework for understanding the ways in which subnational governance arrangements produce divergent types and dynamics of political violence. The variation in agents of g...

Recent years have seen a dramatic escalation in the levels and intensity of violence associated with the northern Nigerian Islamist group, commonly referred to as ‘Boko Haram’. The deliberate and brutal targeting of civilians has been an increasingly pronounced feature of this conflict, contributing to acute civilian vulnerability. Often ascribed to the specific ideological and ethno-religious configuration of Boko Haram, we argue that this violence is similar to that of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), tactically and in the evolution of both groups over time. In addition, violence inflicted on civilians by both groups has necessitated complex strategies of civilian navigation of insecurity risks, including the establishment of informal local security providers. Drawing on both quantitative conflict event data, and qualitative sources, we present a comparative analysis of Boko Haram and the LRA to demonstrate the importance of common strategies of group mobilisation, evolution in rhetoric and tac...

In spite of the shared high profile of recent Islamist attacks on civilians in sub-Saharan Africa, patterns of anti-civilian violence differ across and within violent Islamist groups, and the countries in which they are active. This research seeks to explain this variation by situating Islamist violence within the sub-national spaces in which such groups operate, and the wider conflict environment in which they choose to use, or limit the use of, anti-civilian violence. Drawing on data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset, the research finds that violent Islamist groups are more likely to target civilians where they are the most active conflict agent, even when other conflict agents are active in the same spaces; but less likely to do so when they are relatively weak and in competition with other non-state armed groups. Anti-civilian violence is thus deployed strategically by violent Islamist groups, while its function as a signalling or retributive policing tool depends on the relativ...

What explains the emergence of Islamist violence as a substantial security threat in such diverse contexts as Kenya, Mali and Nigeria? This article addresses this question through an exploration of the strategies of governance employed by states, and how these shape the emergence and mode of collective violence. Conflict research often emphasises the specificity of Islamist violence; but these conflicts can be understood as a form of political exclusion and grievance-based violence, comparable to other forms of political violence. Further, violent Islamist groups emerge from local conditions: the areas in which groups are established share similar local experiences of governance and political marginalisation; a history of violent conflict on which Islamist militants capitalise; and key triggering events expanding or reinforcing state exclusion. These findings challenge a narrative emphasising the global, interconnected nature of Islamist violence. This article pairs data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset (ACLED) with Afrobarometer survey data and case study evidence to identify drivers of Islamist violence across three African countries.

This article reports on the potential macroeconomic benefits of peace stemming from a reduction in farmer-pastoralist violence in four Middle Belt states of Nigeria (Benue, Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Plateau). Farmers and pastoralists routinely clash over access to farmland, grazing areas, stock routes, and water points for both animals and households. Farmer-pastoralist violence in these states is a relatively low-intensity form of conflict, but it is regionally widespread and chronic, and its incidence is arguably increasing. Using estimates of potential income benefits of peace at the household-level derived from a related study, we herein derive macroeconomic benefits via an input-output model of the Nigerian economy. We estimate these benefits to amount to around 2.8 percent of the nominal Nigerian GDP (or around 0.8 percent of the total Nigerian GDP, inclusive of the informal sector), representing a major macroeconomic opportunity. We break out these benefits by sector, showing that the sectors that stand to gain most from peace are the crop production, food and beverage, livestock, and chemical and petroleum industries. [JEL codes: C65, D74, E01]

This research explores the relationship between cultural demography and Islamist violence in Africa in a cross-national time series study. It argues that while religious demography can explain some aspects of Islamist violence, these explanations have to date been privileged over analyses which take into account the way institutional and political relations of the state incentivize and de-incentivize the salience of particular identities in collective action. This paper uses disaggregated conflict event data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset (ACLED) to test the relationships between religious group size, diversity, ethnicity and Islamist violence. The results highlight that approaches to explaining Islamist violence emphasising the cultural specificity of Islam as particularly prone to violence, and those focusing on competition between diverse identity groups as explanations for the rise of Islamist violence are misguided. Rather, ethnic political power relations emerge as important interacting factors in religious identity conflict, with Islamist violence as an example. The article makes an original contribution both empirically, by testing existing theories of Islamist violence on previously unanalysed data; and theoretically, by highlighting the importance of political marginalisation and strategic identity construction as explanations for violent Islamist activity.

Approximately 185,000GossypiumEST sequences comprising >94,800,000 nucleotides were amassed from 30 cDNA libraries constructed from a variety of tissues and organs under a range of conditions, including drought stress and pathogen challenges. These libraries were derived from allopolyploid cotton (Gossypium hirsutum; ATand DTgenomes) as well as its two diploid progenitors,Gossypium arboreum(A genome) andGossypium raimondii(D genome). ESTs were assembled using the Program for Assembling and Viewing ESTs (PAVE), resulting in 22,030 contigs and 29,077 singletons (51,107 unigenes). Further comparisons among the singletons and contigs led to recognition of 33,665 exemplar sequences that represent a nonredundant set of putativeGossypiumgenes containing partial or full-length coding regions and usually one or two UTRs. The assembly, along with their UniProt BLASTX hits, GO annotation, and Pfam analysis results, are freely accessible as a public resource for cotton genomics. Because ESTs from diploid and allotetraploidGossypiumwere combined in a single assembly, we were in many cases able to bioinformatically distinguish duplicated genes in allotetraploid cotton and assign them to either the A or D genome. The assembly and associated information provide a framework for future investigation of cotton functional and evolutionary genomics.

Microarray analysis of large-scale temporal and tissue-specific plant gene expression changes occurring during a susceptible plant-pathogen interaction revealed different gene expression profile changes in cotton root and hypocotyl tissues. In hypocotyl tissues infected with Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. vasinfectum, increased expression of defense-related genes was observed, whereas few changes in the expression levels of defense-related genes were found in infected root tissues. In infected roots, more plant genes were repressed than were induced, especially at the earlier stages of infection. Although many known cotton defense responses were identified, including induction of pathogenesis-related genes and gossypol biosynthesis genes, potential new defense responses also were identified, such as the biosynthesis of lignans. Many of the stress-related gene responses were common to both tissues. The repression of drought-responsive proteins such as aquaporins in both roots and hypocotyls represents a previously unreported response of a host to pathogen attack that may be specific to vascular wilt diseases. Gene expression results implicated the phytohormones ethylene and auxin in the disease process. Biochemical analysis of hormone level changes supported this observation.

The June 2013 issue of the Conflict Trends report by ACLED looks at the ongoing conflict in Nigeria, which intensified this month with the declaration of a state of emergency in the northeast and a renewed commitment on the part of the federal government to oust the northern Islamist militant group, Boko Haram. The report also examines conflict events in DR-Congo, Niger, Senegal, and South Africa.

The August 2012 issue of the Conflict Trends report focuses on recent political violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan. Realtime data for the month of July is presented for each of these countries, and compared with historical trends to identify profiles and patterns in the geography, agents, and modalities of violence in each case.

The November 2012 issue of the Conflict Trends report is the eighth in a series of monthly publications from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset (ACLED). This month is the first in a series of regionally-focused reports, looking at the West African states of Benin, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali, and Mauritania.

The high-molecular-weight glutenin subunits (HMW-GSs) are considered to be one of the most important components of wheat gluten, contributing to the unique viscoelastic properties of wheat dough. The HMW-GSs are highly homologous in sequence and structure and a mixture of subunits is usually present in wheat flours. Consequently, it is difficult to purify these proteins separately in appreciable amounts. Expression in heterologous systems provides a clear opportunity to produce large amounts of single HMW-GS proteins, amounts (up to 100 mg) which are required for in vitro analysis of these proteins. However, since the first expression studies of HMW-GSs, over 10 years ago, this technology has not been widely utilized. Previous studies have been analytical or small scale (5-100 ml) and in most cases only partial purity was obtained. In the present paper, we describe in detail the expression of the HMW-GSs Glu1-Dx2, Dx5, Dy10, and Dy12 for the first time on a large scale, producing up to 100 mg of target protein from a 2-liter bacterial culture, using a Biostat fermenter. Our results include optimization of expression conditions to increase yield and stability of proteins. Results also include localization, differences between x- and y-type expression and small-scale versus large-scale expression. We also developed a large-scale purification procedure. The bacterially expressed proteins have the same molecular weight on SDS-PAGE and the same retention times on RP-HPLC as their native counterparts extracted from flour. Functionality tests, on the bacterially produced proteins, have shown a clear correlation with the equivalent native proteins from flour. These results provide a clear opportunity to produce protein in amounts necessary for more detailed studies of the structure and function of the HMW-GSs and glutenin polymers on dough development and quality.

of the African Sahel 1 . We consider how the dominant narrative for Africa generally, and the Sahel specifically, ‘securitizes’ space, and presents poverty, underdevelopment, and ‘ungoverned’ spaces as security threats to be addressed (Abrahamsen 2005; Keenan 2008). We argue that the terms ‘failed’ and ‘ungoverned’ have become coterminous and common because they benefit various state and international powers within and across the Sahel, who avoid responsibility for the geo-political and economic processes within these spaces. Not only does the term ‘ungoverned’ obscure the actual practices of power within large states with significant underpopulated spaces, but it wrongly assumes and accuses those within that space of being more likely to engage in forms of violence that are destabilizing to state structures and external interests. Actual practices of power across the Sahel reveal that large Sahelian states differ significantly in their types of governance, violence rates and trajectories, activities of opposition groups, and longterm prospects for peace. The concept of ‘ungoverned space’ pervades discussion of global security threats, and dominates analysis and policy approaches

The ‘perfect storm’ that enveloped Mali in 2012 has since escalated into a protracted and widespread crisis across the Sahel. The region currently hosts multiple, moving threats, which are most active in the three states of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. In those states alone, between 2012 and 2019, there have been 1,463 armed clashes, 4,723 civilians killed, at the hands of 195 violent armed groups, in 1,263 discrete locations.1 Violence reached its highest level to date in 2019 and continues at heightened frequency, suggesting a dangerous threshold has been reached and new frontlines loom. The critical lesson of this briefing is that this tsunami of conflict did not initially manifest as overtly Islamist or even ideologically coherent, but grew from opportunism. Populist rhetoric, displays of weakened state authority, a brutal—or absent—security sector, the militarization of neighbors, livelihoods and communities each constitute viable ways that the Sahel violence can metastasize through the wider region.