American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, San Francisco, March 17-21, 2026 Paper session organized by Lacey Harris-Coble, University of Florida, and Amalie Ravn Weinrich, University of Copenhagen Abstract Trade cuts across economic, political, cultural, and environmental geographies, yet it is not often given attention as a standalone topic. The geography of trade examines how […]
American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, San Francisco, March 17-21, 2026 Paper session organized by Olivier J. Walther and David G. Russell, University of Florida Abstract The goal of this paper session is to examine how space shapes civil wars. We are particularly interested in understanding which local determinants explain the onset of political […]
After a decade spent carving out a niche in conflict studies, the time has come to defend it. Since the mid-2010s, my Lab has documented the geography of violence in Africa. To track the spatial evolution of armed conflicts, we have developed a unique indicator that measures both the intensity and spatial concentration of violence. […]
The number of violent events recorded in the last decade in West Africa is either independent of agricultural seasonality or increases with the abundance of resources. The lack of seasonality in West African conflicts suggests that political violence does not have a direct link with environmental factors. Instead, the story of hunger is one of […]
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Subnational data reveal a very strong link between food and political insecurity in West Africa. Regions subject to food insecurity are not only prone to more violence, but conflict is more concentrated spatially than in other regions. More food insecurity in conflict regions This correspondence is particularly evident when disaggregated food security data is superimposed […]
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Spatial analysts thought they could unite geography around a few spatial features. Their failure should not obscure the enthusiasm that reigned in the discipline some 60 years ago. The trilogy of spatial analysis Geographers have long argued that space could be represented on a map by a combination of three fundamental features: points, lines, and […]
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Scientific progress is rarely linear. Some ideas go out of fashion, only to reappear in a new guise later. Economic geographers know all about this, having seen their concepts of central places, regions, and cities suddenly revived by the New Economic Geography in the 1990s. I had a similar adventure in my work on conflict. […]
Growing interest in the study of networks is an opportunity to question the very nature of geographic space, the most fundamental yet least well-defined concept in our discipline. Networks in geography Networks are all the rage in geography. In recent years, a growing number of geographers have been seeking to better understand the relationships between […]
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In the past 25 years, French Professor Denis Retaillé was involved in the supervision of 39 graduate students. In 2006, I became one of them after completing a joint dissertation between the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the University of Rouen in France. During my professional career, I have often wondered who else had […]
The creation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in 2023 is the most recent manifestation of a long process of political fragmentation in West Africa. These regional transformations are fueled by a more global rejection of Western-inspired integration models. By Olivier Walther, 2/18/2025 A laboratory for integration West Africa […]