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Conflict across African states has often been linked to ethnic-based biases in government, and exclusive policies. However, the domestic politics of developing states, and the elites who contest for power therein, have often been overlooked when explaining the patterns and risk of disorder and violence. We consider how African leaders practice politics in whom to represent, and at what level. These choices have consequences as how regimes accommodate political elites creates different competitive conditions which, in turn, create incentives and opportunities for political violence. Using a dataset on cabinet appointments over twenty years, we find that high levels of elite political inclusion and mal-apportionment in positions is consistently associated with increases in non-state violence. Power distribution levels among those groups included in senior positions account for more political violence than that which stems from exclusive politics.

In the post-2000 years, Zimbabwe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party became locked in strong internal factional struggles, which intensified as the economy declined and president Robert Mugabe advanced in age. This chapter maintains that political violence was an important feature of these internal struggles. The violent June 2008 run-off presidential election, which is the chapter’s main focus, was emblematic of ZANU-PF’s internal uses of violence. The chapter analyses political violence in Zimbabwe in three sequential parts: the patterns and explanations for the 2008 poll violence, the subsequent low-level violence since 2008, and the violence emanating from internal ZANU-PF factional struggles. What emerges from this analysis is that violence is an important way in which internal competition in ZANU-PF is performed and there are continuities in this violence over the past decade. In addition, violence is most intense during election periods. Despite the repeated risks of violence during elections, Zimbabwe remains a relatively stable country.

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...

Pro-government militias (PGMs) are armed, political organizations that assist regime and state elites through illicit violence. This article considers how and where to situate militias within large...

This analysis illustrates how violence patterns are shaped by local power concentrations. Disaggregated conflict analysis has led to major advances into understanding conflict trends, agents, and dynamics of violence but has not been matched by studies of disaggregated politics, in particular on the subnational level. This analysis details how conflict event location, frequency, and intensity is largely determined by levels of customary authority and development; while armed group bases and control networks are established in areas characterized by weak, co-opted local authorities, wealth generation possibilities, and proximity to other network nodes. This demonstrates that dominant opposition groups co-opt local elites and target those who cannot be easily co-opted or belong to alternative networks. Manifestations of conflict are therefore not well explained by the typically static resource, poverty, or state capacity measures. Local politics and customary authority determine where government, rebels, and militias dare to tread. Sierra Leone Local–Location Event Dataset—a new disaggregated data set on the Sierra Leone war and local source feature of Armed Conflict Location and Event Data—provides substantial evidence for our subnational conflict explanations.

Conflicts are complex, dynamic processes wherein the frequency and intensity of violence changes throughout the contest. In this article, we explore the temporal dynamics of two long-term civil war...

This analysis of urban political violence across Africa considers why the proportion and frequency of conflict is increasing in urban areas while decreasing in rural areas. The decline of formally organized violence in predominantly rural areas, and the increase of more variegated forms of political opposition and conflict in urban zones, is interrogated through demographic and grievance-based explanations. Urban violence displays a range of agents, goals, intensities, and triggers and is alternatively regarded as a response to the lack of capacity and poor governance found in urban contexts, or to the changing demographic and political character of African states. Yet, the multiple, low-intensity forms of urban violence present—including militia attacks, communal contests, riots, and protests—indicate a change in the collective action capabilities and goals of modern conflict agents. These goals are themselves shaped by the experience of mounting urban grievances, but the ethnic and regional heterogeneity in urban areas prevents substantial collective action to counter the urban marginalization practiced by many African governments. Despite the low-intensity nature of urban threats, this compounded violence is a substantial security threat across developing states and is leading to the rise of the “fragile city.”

Rates of foreign direct investment (FDI) to Africa are increasing, yet little is known about how this will affect the political environment. One possibility, explored here, is that increasing levels of FDI within developing states will incentivize state conflict activity. Using an instrumental strategy, we show that in states with a low regard for civil liberties, or with unhealthy economies (i.e. states with a cash deficit), increased access to investment is associated with a higher number of conflict actions by the state. We argue that access to investment can push regimes into using violent strategies to secure their internal environment and to ensure their survival, specifically in their engaging in conflict against opposition and armed combatants. This underscores the need for extensive monitoring of state behavior following the receipt of investment, similar to the oversight of conditional aid.

The debate concerning how water access, availability, and change will impact conflict is bolstered by growing evidence that some influence exists, however inconsistent. Clear conclusions are obscured by the variety of water issues in developing countries, the difference between direct and indirect effects on conflict, and the additional uncertainty of what future climate changes may do to water availability and rights. This chapter summarizes how the conflict literature has integrated water issues into analyses of violence. In contrast, water researchers are mainly concerned with how little and how poorly water resources are used and managed across Africa. Resource management and politics emerge as the most serious contributors to water stress. Initial conclusions suggest that climate change and associated water shortages are far less of a problem than access and scarcity, and that water politics is leading to new contests, possibly violent, embedded in patterns of marginalization, exclusion, and poor governance.

Across African states, militias have become one of the main agents of political violence, accounting for a third of all recent conflict. Militia violence is attributed to cultural reactions to disorder, failing and predatory states, and local cleavages which emerge during civil wars. However, activity largely occurs in democratizing states without civil wars. This article presents a typology of militias based on their local roles and actions and an explanation for the prevalence of “competition militias.” Changes in macro politics ushered in a new era of conflict and fragmentation among political elites; militias operate as private armies for these elites. The goal of this violence is to alter the political landscape, increase power for patrons, protect supportive communities, and hinder opponents. Incentives within African democratic institutions reward the use of force by elites. As a result, African democracies, and states transitioning into democracy, are not likely to be internally peaceful. Futhermore, the dominant type of conflict across African states shifts to accommodate the goals of violent agents within modern political contexts.

African political geographies have been overlooked in the discussion of internal migration and urbanization. Yet institutional changes since the early 1990s altered the practices of acquiring and keeping power across Africa, and it is now possible to address how rural and urban areas have changed as a result. In this article, the focus is on how political practices interact with circular internal migration flows. “Democratic” practices depend on the manipulation of rural spatial clustering and migration, but modern political institutions effectively disenfranchise urban and migrant voters, resulting in the continued reproduction and exacerbation of spatial inequalities. Further, these are responsible for the poor conditions of urban areas, the proliferation of rural bias across states, and limited support for urban political identities and programmatic change.

Attention to geography in the study of civil war has risen dramatically in recent years. Beginning with county-level data in the fields of classical political geography, international relations, and comparative politics, a vast body of conflict research is now dedicated to sub-national analysis. This later turn is itself geographical. Innovations in the geographical study of civil war have dramatically improved our collective understanding of violence and continue to call for modifications of conflict theory. While a turn toward geography has therefore proved valuable for academic research that is most often dominated by political science, there remain fundamental differences within the research community about what constitutes geographical inquiry. An example of such a difference is the attention that physical geography (such as forest cover, mountainous terrain) has received in civil war research over investigations of the nuanced social composition of regions and localities, which tends to dominate for conflict research within the discipline of human geography. The spatial dependencies among conflict locations and events need to be highlighted for their importance. These patterns can reveal important underlying social forces that are interesting to scholars in various disciplines, as well as to the study of key geographical processes and the shift toward spatial disaggregation. This localization of violence studies is necessary and concerns the notion of hierarchical scale, which is a conceptual foundation of human geography. In studying the geography of civil war, there are methodological tools that can outline some risks associated with geospatial analysis of violence.

Disaggregated approaches to conflict research have led to new insights into the patterns and processes of political violence in developing countries. This article uses the most comprehensive subnational political violence data (ACLED) to observe where and when violence against civilians occurs within civil wars. Several new conclusions are evident from an event-based analysis of civilian violence: retribution or collateral damage are poor explanations for attacks on the unarmed. Instead, civilians are targeted because they are accessible; rebel groups kill more civilians, often in an attempt to create new frontlines for conflict. However, governments are also responsible for high rates of civilian death, yet they often "contract" this violence out to militias. This analysis confirms that there are multiple violent groups within civil war spaces, and small opposition groups commit higher levels of violence against civilians in local spaces. The strength of a violent group compared to its competition shapes how much civilian violence it commits. The results suggest that theories that emphasize civilian support and retribution as a basis for violence against civilians have overlooked the importance of how multiple violent opposition groups compete within civil wars, and how civilians suffer as a result.

Previous research on environment and security has contested the existence, nature and significance of a climate driver of conflict. In this study, we have focused on small-scale conflict over East Africa where the link between resource availability and conflict is assumed to be more immediate and direct. Using the parameter of rainfall variability to explore the marginal influence of the climate on conflict, the article shows that in locations that experience rebel or communal conflict events, the frequency of these events increases in periods of extreme rainfall variation, irrespective of the sign of the rainfall change. Further, these results lend support to both a ‘zero-sum’ narrative, where conflicting groups use force and violence to compete for ever-scarcer resources, and an ‘abundance’ narrative, where resources spur rent-seeking/wealth-seeking and recruitment of people to participate in violence. Within the context of current uncertainty regarding the future direction of rainfall change over much of Africa, these results imply that small-scale conflict is likely to be exacerbated with increases in rainfall variability if the mean climate remains largely unchanged; preferentially higher rates of rebel conflict will be exhibited in anomalously dry conditions, while higher rates of communal conflict are expected in increasingly anomalous wet conditions.

This article discusses how conflict patterns affect the volume, direction and types of migration within the developing world. Conflict impact and poverty are the two primary drivers directly shaping migrations within poor and high-risk environments. Indirect drivers of migration include livelihood fragility, ecological and political instabilities. Conflicts overwhelmingly occur in states where much of the population is dependent upon the environment/natural resources for their livelihoods. There is little reliable evidence to suggest a link between civil conflict and climate change, however, the environmental changes occurring across developing states shape the ways in which civilians can respond to political and economic threats. The crucial point is that the communities who are subject to increasing environmental variation and disruption, through either external or internal processes, are likely to become poorer as a consequence. This poverty lessens their ability to respond to the myriad of threats in their environs, including conflict, ecological disasters, disease, or economic hardship. Hence, there is an endogeneity to conflict, precipitating factors and possible outcomes: the persistence of violence plays a determining role in the sustainability of livelihoods, poverty levels and the propensity of migration within chronically conflicted areas. Those most vulnerable to forced migration live in ‘chronically vulnerable areas’, which are characterized by the deterioration, loss or destruction of primary livelihood systems and productive assets, environmental degradation and deterioration of natural resources, increasing impoverishment of communities and households, geographical isolation and a dependence on relief.

In terms of the frequency of politically violent acts, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria are some of the most unstable states within a highly volatile continent. In Uganda, the primary rebel threat ope...

Violent conflict has engulfed much of Somalia for decades. Marked most dramatically by the fall of Mohamed Siad Barre's dictatorship early in 1991, southern Somalia remains in an untenable state of civil strife that amounts to a humanitarian disaster. In this article our goal is not to explain why violence occurs, but to investigate where and when it has occurred. To achieve this we employ precisely georeferenced conflict event data to analyze dynamics of Somalia's violent political landscape from before the Ogaden wars of the late-1970s through Ethiopia's intervention in Somalia beginning in December 2006. We utilize Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools and spatial statistical methods to characterize the distribution of violence over time and across space within Somalia. We argue that Somalia's conflict meets some expectations of civil war violence described in the conflict studies literature, but some unexpected trends also appear. Country-wide, for instance, we show that conflict intensi...

This article considers why and how physical geography may influence conflict patterns within African states. It juxtaposes arguments relating to four features of the physical environment— distance, resources, terrain, and size—to those purporting rebels base insurgency tactics on the strategic value of locations. Using GIS and spatial econometrics, a geographically disaggregated dataset of population, distance to capitals, borders, resources, terrain, and road densities is tested against conflict data from ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset). ACLED disaggregates data on internal conflict into georeferenced individual events. The analysis covers six of the most conflict prone states in Central Africa. The analysis confirms that an area's physical attributes do not have a uniform effect on the likelihood of experiencing a conflict event. Areas of high strategic value, including densely populated areas and military zones, have a higher risk of conflict than rural, peripheral areas.

This article presents ACLED, an Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset. ACLED codes the actions of rebels, governments, and militias within unstable states, specifying the exact location and date of battle events, transfers of military control, headquarter establishment, civilian violence, and rioting. In the current version, the dataset covers 50 unstable countries from 1997 through 2010. ACLED’s disaggregation of civil war and transnational violent events allow for research on local level factors and the dynamics of civil and communal conflict. Findings from subnational conflict research challenges conclusions from larger national-level studies. In a brief descriptive analysis, the authors find that, on average, conflict covers 15% of a state’s territory, but almost half of a state can be directly affected by internal wars.

This article discusses the probability of increased communal conflict in African states due to the “political vulnerability” of groups to climate change. From an initial examination of communal conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa, the risk of conflict depends largely on the size and political importance of ethnic groups. Environmental issues can be catalysts to low-level conflict in marginalized communities, but the critical factor is the extent of political and economic marginalization. Small, politically insignificant ethnic groups experience most conflicts related to environmental pressures. This framework informs a prediction of where we should expect to see high levels of politically induced vulnerability and resultant intra- and intercommunal conflicts.

This article examines the link between subnational poverty and the location of civil war events. Drawing on the ACLED dataset, which breaks internal conflicts down to individual events at the local level, we take a disaggregated approach to the study of conflict. Local-level socioeconomic data are taken from the Liberian Demographic and Health Survey. With geographical cells of approximately 76 km 2 as units of analysis, we test how absolute and relative welfare affect the presence and number of conflict events during the 1989-2002 Liberian civil war. We control for neighboring conflict events, distance to Monrovia and national borders, population density, diamond deposits, and ethnic affiliations. War events were more frequent in the richer locations. This may provide better support for “opportunity” explanations than for “relative deprivation” theories of conflict, but we argue that the relative weakness of the Liberian government makes it difficult to distinguish between the two.

Climate change is expected to bring about major change in freshwater availability, the productive capacity of soils, and in patterns of human settlement. However, considerable uncertainties exist with regard to the extent and geographical distribution of these changes. Predicting scenarios for how climate-related environmental change may influence human societies and political systems necessarily involves an even higher degree of uncertainty. The direst predictions about the impacts of global warming warn about greatly increased risks of violent conflict over increasingly scarce resources such as freshwater and arable land. We argue that our best guess about the future has to be based on our knowledge about the relationship between demography, environment and violent conflict in the past. Previous rigorous studies in the field have mostly focused on national-level aggregates. This article represents a new approach to assess the impact of environment on internal armed conflict by using georeferenced (GIS) data and small geographical, rather than political, units of analysis. It addresses some of the most important factors assumed to be strongly influenced by global warming: land degradation, freshwater availability, and population density and change. While population growth and density are associated with increased risks, the effects of land degradation and water scarcity are weak, negligible or insignificant. The results indicate that the effects of political and economic factors far outweigh those between local level demographic/environmental factors and conflict.

Highlights • Across Africa, conflict increases the price of commodities, which, in turn, increase the rate of political violence. • Climate change has a weak direct effect on political violence rates. • Climate change indirectly affects conflict rates through the effect of increased food prices. • Governments and stable markets play a key role in mitigating the negative effects of climate change. • Studies of how climate change will affect social, economic and political conditions should be conducted on the local level., This study investigates the relationship between violent conflict, food price, and climate variability at the subnational level. Using disaggregated data on 113 African markets from January 1997 to April 2010, interrelationships between the three variables are analyzed in simultaneous equation models. We find that: (i) a positive feedback exists between food price and violence – higher food prices increase conflict rates within markets and conflict increases food prices; (ii) anomalously dry conditions are associated with increased frequencies of conflict; and (iii) decreased rainfall exerts an indirect effect on conflict through its impact on food prices. These findings suggest that the negative effects of climate variability on conflict can be mitigated by interventions and effective price management in local markets. Creating environments in which food prices are stable and reliable, and markets are accessible and safe, can lower the impacts of both climate change and conflict feedbacks.

Our article analyzes how transitioning political institutions create incentives and disincentives for opposition groups to incite different forms of political violence. We argue that variation on two specific parameters of governance—checks and balances and political participation—compels states toward one of the three forms of conflict, including civil wars, political militia, and riots. Using disaggregated data on different types of political violence across Africa from 1997 to 2012, we analyzed two parameters of governance in both count and change models. We also identified high-risk conflict periods. Typical regime types (democracy, autocracy, anocracy) cannot explain manifestations of conflict, as violence occurs in regimes with varying levels of political openness and competition. Opposition groups actively respond to regime transitions, as changes in institutional parameters correlate with shifts into alternative forms of violence within states.

This Symposium integrates quantitative and qualitative information to assess the representation of women in academic geography in The Netherlands, Catalonia, Hungary and Singapore. It offers comparative commentary on the situation in the United States and additionally a focus on the experiences of a group of women geographers of colour in Canada, the US and the UK. Through this cross‐national approach, the significance of context in shaping the representation of women geographers becomes apparent, especially the importance of political economy and of shifting labour markets. The papers also make clear the intersections between the gender make‐up of the profession, the nature of the curriculum, and students' experiences. They document strategies employed to change women's representation.

Almost all African states experience substantial and widespread political insecurity in a variety of forms. This analysis explains how relationships between groups and governments create incentives and disincentives for distinct forms of political violence to emerge. It argues that ethno-regional communities across Africa are situated within a power hierarchy that determines their relative importance to, and inclusion in, regimes. A dynamic power landscape emerges from relative group positions. Various positions within a hierarchy are associated with particular dominant forms of organized political violence as groups challenge political elites, but are bounded by their goals and characteristics. A failure to consider the political hierarchies and landscapes operating within African states has led to an under specification of the causal mechanisms driving different forms of violence, and an overstatement of benefits from declining civil war rates and inclusive governing coalitions.

A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in order to understand the discrepancy. We believe the origins of the disagreement can be traced back to the review article’s underlying quantitative meta-analysis, which suffers from shortcomings with respect to sample selection and analytical coherence. A modified assessment that addresses some of these problems suggests that scientific research on climate and conflict to date has produced mixed and inconclusive results.

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.

Ascribing violence to extreme weather and climate change risks anchoring a modern form of environmental determinism.