Geographies of Armed Conflict and Protest in Africa, 1997–2019

Are urban protests on the rise in Africa? Is civil war a rural phenomenon in retreat? How has the composition and geography of armed conflict and protest evolved over the last two decades? In this chapter we answer these questions through a quantitative summary of the key patterns and trends in protests, riots, and armed conflict across the continent. We leverage data from two of the most widely used datasets in contemporary conflict studies: the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme Georeferenced Event Dataset and the Armed Conflict Location and Event dataset. We link this to nuanced geospatial data on human settlement patterns from the EU Global Human Settlement Layer Settlement Model, allowing is to distinguish between events located in urban centres, urban clusters, and rural areas. Our findings show that armed conflict and protest are increasingly urban phenomenon in North Africa. Similarly, the frequency of urban protest in sub-Saharan Africa has increased substantially. However, conventional armed conflicts involving state and non-state actors in rural areas remain common and have risen over the same period, albeit concentrated in a handful of subregions. Our study frames ongoing debates surrounding the frequency and character of violent and non-violent political contests on the African continent.