Introducing the Spatial Conflict Dynamics Indicator of Political Violence

Abstract

Modern armed conflicts have a tendency to spill across state boundaries as armed groups relocate to countries where there is less military capacity or political inclination to fight them. Thus far, the spatial diffusion of these conflicts has remained under-explored. To fill this gap, this article presents a new Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi) that measures the intensity and spatial concentration of political violence at the subnational level from 1997 to 2019. This new resource leverages data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) from 1997-2019. Applied to the case of North and West Africa, the new spatial indicator shows which regions experience the most conflicts, how conflicts change geographically over time, and how foreign interventions affect the geography of conflicts.

Measuring Spatiotemporal Civil War Dimensions Using Community-Based Dynamic Network Representation (CoDNet)

“…Different civil war-affected areas might share similarities related to the underlying nature of the conflict itself, or experience spatio-temporal dependencies related to the spread of warfare. In particular interest to scholars, especially in recent years, is the geography of civil war -how and where civil war spreads, clusters, intensifies, and declines [9,19]. Understanding these patterns and their determinants will greatly improve our ability to explain and ultimately mitigate civil war risk.…”

“…The next necessary phase is to improve the geographic operationalization of civil war and its features, using these data to identify important trends and dependencies that cannot be immediately recognized. While scholars have adopted new ways of modeling and incorporating geolocated event data in their efforts to test the determinants of civil war (right-hand side variables), improving the viability of the geography of civil war as the dependent variable (left-hand side) necessitates a more comprehensive way of modeling its spatial and temporal dynamics, and their specific properties (e.g., conflict concentration and spread within and across locations) therein, as scholars came to recently recognize [8,9,14].…”

Appréhender les dynamiques locales des conflits en Afrique du Nord et de l’Ouest

“…Dans le Sahel central, la violence politique s' est largement déplacée au sud du Sahara, où a débuté le conflit malien, et englobe à présent la majeure partie du Burkina Faso et une part importante de l' ouest du Niger (carte 2). Comme constaté dans le cadre d' études antérieures, la plupart des violences touchent les régions rurales et les petits centres urbains ( (Radil et al, 2023 [7] )). Les capitales, jusqu'ici largement épargnées, forment quant à elles un archipel de plus en plus restreint au sein duquel la communication entre zones sécurisées devient difficile (OCDE/CSAO, 2023 [5] ).…”

15 years of analyzing the Global Terrorism Database: An overview

“…A new tool was developed to elevate spatiotemporal analyses. Walther et al (2021) introduced the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi), that allows researchers to examine how the geography of conflicts evolves. It measures intensity (e.g., frequency of attacks) and spatial concentration of political violence.…”