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.
This Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator or SCDi, is now used by policy-makers, such as the OECD, to analyze how violence spreads across borders.
To track the political evolution of armed conflicts, we have modeled, for the first time, how cooperative and conflictual networks connect violent actors, using Dynamic Social Network Analysis.
Leveraging a dataset of more than 60,000 violent events from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, our work has led to develop an online “Conflict networks” portal hosted by the OECD Sahel and West Africa Club.
Our numerous publications suggest that conflict networks have become more centralized over time, making peaceful efforts more difficult than ever.
By studying the space, time, and actors involved in political violence, we have been able to spatialize the life cycles that have marked African conflicts since the end of the Cold War.
This work has demonstrated that African armed conflicts express regularities in the way violence is spatially and temporally distributed.
Our turf?
This niche in conflict studies is shrinking.
In May of this year, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences claimed to have “developed” the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator that we invented. Our protests have convinced the publisher to publish a formal Major Correction to address this issue.
More recently, a team from ETH Zurich claimed to have developed “a novel web-based tool that applies a visual analytics perspective to conflict dynamics” that resembles the one we designed for the OECD Mapping Territorial Transformations in Africa website in 2021. No mention was made of our work on conflict networks.
What’s next?
Perhaps our experience can be explained by the growing number of papers published in conflict studies. For some researchers, producing a comprehensive literature review may seem like an impossible task.
But we are not hard to find: type “conflict networks” in Google Scholar and our work appears in 6th position!
Disciplinary boundaries may further complicate matters. The political scientists who developed the interface on conflict networks, for example, admit that they were unaware of our work published in security studies, policy, and computer science journals since 2015.
They offered to include some of our work in the revised version of their working paper and “exchange notes at some point”, which we hope will be the start of a fruitful and multidisciplinary conversation.
So, should we be worried? After all, the fact that our work is being taken up by others should make us happy. It is a sign that what we are doing is relevant.
But it also raises a puzzling question: if publishing is no longer sufficient to claim anteriority, how much time should we devote to coming up with new ideas?
By Olivier Walther, 8/24/2025, updated 11/3/2025.