African Conflicts

Incessant conflicts in Africa are still one of the biggest challenges in the modern world. Even if they are not particularly indicated in the media, they remain a big part of the history of the whole world as well as a factor influencing current economic and political moves. One example of how complex, but mostly how current are concerns related to the conflicts in Africa is Rwanda Genocide Report [1] published this April. Where a group of international researchers work for a few years in order to recognize causes of conflict in 1994 in Rwanda where 800 000 have died. The reflections which they collect will possibly influence French international politics (and other former colonizers) in following years, which can have economical effects in Europe. This case just demonstrates how essential, convoluted and present are conflicts in Africa, even though they may seem far away.

Despite the fact that extensive research was conducted over various factors related to the conflicts, and numerous attempts of help were offered, the problem appears to be a big challenge. In the article ‘‘Perspectives on “New” Conflicts in Africa’’ [2] we can read about the changing character of wars in Africa: ‘’African conflicts are transforming in character in the twenty-first century. The conflicts have simmered in intensity and focus within Africa’s changing sociopolitical and multilayered social space. African conflicts now prominently bubble from the low everyday spheres of African societies’’. It is apparent that longstanding civil wars that ravaged several African countries in the Cold War and post–Cold War era seemed to have been resolved. Nevertheless there are “new” wars which do not necessarily involve states as primary parties nor physical combat and where globalization can play a significant role. It is crucial to understand this change and identify factors shaping a new frontier in African conflicts in order to react properly.

What is characteristic for Arfica and african conflicts, is that due to extremely young society (the median age in Africa is 19.7 years ) and very high unemployed among youth (one-third of Africa’s nearly 420 million youth (aged 15–35) as ‘unemployed and discouraged’, another third as ‘vulnerably employed’, and only one in six as being in wage employment) many of those young people get involved in violent, armed rebellion against authority, often organised by insurgent groups. Due to high aggression among those groups and poor organisations of the actions many civilians become victims of their attacks. One of those groups is Al-Shabab, or “the Youth,” based in Somalia which is responsible for raising the number of violent attacks since 2016. Another example could be Boko Haram, a terrorist organization based in northeastern Nigeria, which is also active in Chad, Niger and northern Cameroon or Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). The influence of these factors and activity of those organisations can be easily seen in the following analysis.

In this study, we used a data set from ACLED [3] which contains information on: event type (including violent events like battles but also demonstrations and non-violent actions) , date of the event, exact data about localisation including latitude, longitude, name of the country and name f the region according to administrative division, participants of the conflicts and associated organisations. In addition, socio-economic data as: GDP per country, Development index [4], population was added. The goal was to perform high level analysis of conflict in Africa in the years 1997-2016. This particular data was chosen due to including not only military conflict but all types of actions. By adding socio-economic data we tried to obtain a bigger picture of possible causes. The users of our web-page should be able to understand the high-level trends in recent conflicts and find the information about possible correlations of various factors. Interactive plots should allow us to easily identify changes and differences between countries/ years/ character of conflicts while interactive maps allow us to get the geographical reference. Bar plots and scatter plots were used to clearly show trends in simplistic form.

Let’s have a closer look on the data

In the above graph, we can see how events are distributed in time for each type of conflict. To have an overall look at the situation we decided to give the opportunity to choose whether we want to have months or years on the X, and if we want to observe the total number of crimes or the percentage. As a result of having the frequency of events instead of the their numbers, we can easily compare every conflict type with the other in the context of patterns during the time, while using the absolute number of conflicts we can compare which type has occurred most frequently.

The main pattern which we observed is the increasing number of conflicts after 2010, which holds for most types. This fact could be seen from both variants: the absolute number of conflicts and percentage. Moreover, while looking at the percentage we can see, that this trend occurs for the first 5 types listed in the legend while categories Headquarters or base established and Non-violent transfer of territory were more frequent in the years 1997-2002. From the chart, with percentage and months on X-axis we can observe higher frequency in the first months of the year again for Headquarters or base established and Non-violent transfer of territory which as a whole could point to a few big events.

An interactive barplot with a number of fatalities with the same functionalities gives the possibility to investigate how the situation of victims looked like in the years 1997-2016. What first comes to our eyes is exceeding number of fatalities in type Riots/Protests in last 4 years. Furthermore, we can again observe a significant rise after 2010 for the first 5 listed categories. By combining information from charts with years in percentage and months in percentage we can conclude, that it was one main event in July 2003 in type Headquarters or base established, but it was not large in number so when we look at the scale with total number for all categories we cannot separate it.

Below a development of the number of conflicts over time is presented. Unlike in the classic bar chart races, here we decided to stick to the fixed order of countries (and this way limit them to top 20 most affected) because then it is easier to see when in each of the countries a new serious conflict or war started.
For example, one can notice how until 2009 it was “relatively” peaceful in Egypt and Libya and how the bar accelerated after that year. Similarly, it is also easy to see that 2009 was the beginning of a latest phase of Somalia’s civil war, when the bar almost “exploded”.
Another interesting case is South Sudan, which has absolutely no conflicts until 2011, which can suggest this is a newly created country.