A bibliometric analysis of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of African Borderlands shows that the field is highly fragmented, with over 90% of references cited only once and only a small core of widely shared works. By Olivier Walther, 5/19/2026. A new handbook At the end of June, Routledge will publish our Handbook of African Borderlands. […]
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. […]
Transport infrastructure is critical in armed conflicts. A dense infrastructure network allows states to provide services to the civilian population and defeat insurgents in a timely manner. Yet, transport infrastructure itself can also become a major target for rebels and violent extremists. This new OECD report examines how the competition for the control of transport […]
Read more "Proximity to roads shapes patterns of violence in North and West Africa"
African armed conflicts express regularities in the way violence is spatially and temporally distributed. This is the main conclusion of a recent paper published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers with Steve Radil and David Russell. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Spatial Conflict Life Cycle to examine where, when and […]