The Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC) is an independent international platform. Its Secretariat is hosted at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Its mission is to promote regional policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of the people in the Sahel and West Africa. SWAC produces and maps data, drafts analyses and facilitates strategic dialogue in order to help policies better anticipate the transformations in the region and their territorial impact. It also promotes regional co-operation and more contextualised policies as a tool for sustainable development and stability. Its current areas of work are food dynamics, cities, environment, and security.

In 2020, the SWAC/OECD Secretariat introduced a new way of analysing the geography of conflicts in North and West Africa, based on the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi). This indicator allows us to understand the intensity and concentration of violence at different levels and to map its evolution over the past quarter of a century. The indicator is currently available on the MAPTA platform (https://mapping-africa-transformations.org).

The editorial and drafting team at the SWAC/OECD Secretariat:

This report expands on previous efforts by the Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC/OECD) to document how violence varies geographically across North and West Africa. Using an innovative tool called the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi), the report examines the links between cities and violence and maps the region’s major conflict hotspots. In a context of rapid urbanisation and unprecedented levels of violence, this report is particularly timely. It addresses the contested question of whether conflict is more urban or rural in nature. It also fills a knowledge gap for policy makers: understanding where violence emerges, spreads and eventually dissipates is key to addressing its root causes. A qualitative analysis of ten cities and sub-regions complements the indicator, to better understand the origins of conflict at the local level.

Chapter 1 examines the importance of cities and urban areas in the development of political violence in North and West Africa since 2000. Using disaggregated data on population and conflict, the chapter shows that violence is predominantly rural across the region. However, while most violence currently occurs in rural areas, the number of violent events also decreases with distance to cities, suggesting that proximity to cities is important for armed groups and their adversaries. In the last 22 years, nearly half of all violent events occurred within just 10 kilometres of an urban area. The chapter also shows that violence tends to oscillate between urban and rural areas over time. As conflict waxes or wanes in one part of the region, so too does the importance of either rural or urban spaces. Finally, the chapter highlights the key role played by jihadist organisations in the current ruralisation of violence, particularly in the Sahel, where extremist groups exploit the resources provided by rural areas.

Chapter 2 examines whether Africa’s urban transformations could lead to an increase in conflicts on the continent. It shows that West Africa is currently characterised by a rapid increase in the number and size of cities, a trend followed by North African countries several decades ago. The Sahel region, especially, is experiencing rapid urbanisation in conjunction with a continuous growth of its rural population. The chapter then discusses some factors that may explain the concentration of conflicts in urban or rural areas. Intra-elite competition and new models of political organisation in democratizing states are two factors that could potentially lead to more violence in cities. However, armed groups can also flourish in rural areas, especially if they can control the population and natural resources. Finally, the chapter shows that urban and rural areas play a crucial role in the life cycle of armed conflicts in the region. As conflicts start, expand and end, the locations of violent events can shift from one area to the other, depending on local dynamics.

Chapter 3 describes the methods used to analyse whether politically motivated violence is more pronounced in urban or rural areas, how the intensity of violence has shifted between cities and their hinterland over time, and how the use of violence varies geographically across North and West Africa. The spatial and temporal relationships between cities and violence are studied using population densities from WorldPop, a global gridded population dataset that has been used for longitudinal analysis since 2000. The report also classifies density data according to the recent “degree of urbanisation” definition adopted by the United Nations, which distinguishes between three categories of human settlements and facilitates cross-national comparisons. Population data are next combined with conflict data from the Armed Conflict and Location & Event Data (ACLED) project to classify violent events as urban, semi-urban or rural, and to calculate the distance from each violent event to the nearest urban area. The report also uses the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi) developed by the Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC/OECD) to identify major clusters of violence in the region. The results of the indicator are complemented by a qualitative analysis of ten case studies that have experienced high levels of violence in the past decade, in order to identify the local roots of urban and rural conflicts.

Chapter 4 examines the changing geography of violent events and fatalities in North and West Africa since the late 1990s. Using disaggregated conflict data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project, the chapter shows that political violence has reached an all-time high in West Africa and considerably decreased in North Africa after the end of the Second Libyan civil war. In West Africa, the Spatial Conflict Dynamics Indicator (SCDi) confirms that 9% of the studied region is currently affected by violent events, compared with only 1% in 2009. Violence is still predominantly clustered and intense, but the proportion of areas that experience more diffuse forms of violence is increasing, a sign that conflicts are expanding to previously unaffected areas. Several clusters of violence have coalesced in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria, forming large conflict hotspots that transcend national boundaries. The SCDi also identifies two new hotspots of violence that are likely to expand in the coming years, one between Burkina Faso and its southern neighbours, and another in north-western Nigeria. Nowhere else in the world has one multistate region been affected by so many forms of violence, each with its own localised roots, progressively converging.

Chapter 5 assesses the relationship between population density and political violence within North and West Africa. The chapter finds that violence is indeed spatially associated with urban areas, occurring most frequently near cities. Using disaggregated conflict data for 21 states across 22 years, the analysis shows that while only one-third of all violent events occurred in locations designated as urban, nearly half occurred within just 10 kilometres of urban areas. The chapter also notes significant differences in the way that violence has evolved in North Africa and West Africa. In West Africa, conflicts are increasingly rural, due to the emergence of jihadist organisations, while urban violence was more common overall in the highly urbanised countries of North Africa. There are also important differences in the relationship between violence and distance to urban areas across states. States with major conflicts, such as Nigeria and Libya, exhibit a clear pattern of violence increasing with proximity to urban centres, while others, such as Mali, do not. Violence tends to be predominantly clustered in small urban areas of less than 100 000 inhabitants, rather than in medium or large areas.