Introducing the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator of political violence

03/03/2020

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by   Olivier J. Walther, et al.

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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.