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 between whom violent events take place on the African continent.
Our study is a first attempt to integrate space, time and social networks into a grid-based metric that can use any disaggregated conflict, such as ACLED.
The full paper can be downloaded here. This blog summarizes the key results.
Walther O, Radil S, Russell D. 2024. The spatial conflict life cycle in Africa. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI:10.1080/24694452.2024.2428812.