This month’s Conflict Trends report is the eighth in a series of monthly publications from the Armed Con-flict Location & Event Dataset (ACLED). Each month, realtime data on conflict events is gathered, pub-lished and analysed, and compared with historical patterns in violence levels, locations and agents to provide an insight into conflict change and continu-ity on the continent.
Last month’s issue (available online at acled-data.com) focused on a number of high-profile country cases (DR-Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia and South Africa). Each of these countries experiences extremely high levels of violent conflict events and associated fatalities, though each has a distinct conflict profile which speaks to the different drivers of political violence in each case.
ACLED publishes data and analysis for the entire African continent from 1997 to date: this month is the first in a series of regionally-focused reports, looking at the West African states of Benin, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali and Mauritania. A regional focus allows us to turn our attention to case studies which may experience lower overall levels of violence than high-profile country cases, but whose internal volatility and drivers of violence are significant both regionally and in discerning broader processes in Africa.
This month also sees a continuation of our special focus feature, with attention turned to the activity, role and nature of Nigeria’s Boko Haram group.
This special focus tracks the group’s origins, aims and patterns of violent behavior. Geographic patterns as well as patterns of engagement with civilians and state forces are explored, before turn-ing to potential future developments in the conflict.
