The Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC) is an independent international platform. Its Secretariat is hosted at the Organisation for the 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. Its objectives are to produce and collect data, draft analyses and facilitate strategic dialogue in order to nurture and promote public policies in line with rapid developments in the region. It also promotes regional co-operation as a tool for sustainable development and stability. Its current areas of work are food dynamics, cities and territories, and security.

In 2020, the Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC/OECD) Secretariat published a landmark book in security studies, The Geography of Conflict in North and West Africa. Launched during the Munich Security Conference in February 2020, the study developed a new indicator to show the intensity and spatial distribution of political violence in three areas: Central Sahel, Lake Chad and Libya.

Political violence in North and West Africa is on the rise. In the last decade, clashes between government forces and local militias, rebel groups and extremist organisations have resulted in over 100 000 deaths. Conflicts have become more violent, increasingly targeting civilians, particularly in rural and border areas, where state power and infrastructures have long been deficient. Hundreds of actors with diverging agendas are involved, and the complex relationships between them have profound consequences on conflict resolution and its geography. This report illustrates that violent organisations cannot be understood in isolation from each other; they are part of a conflict network.

This chapter maps the networks of rivalries and alliances of violent organisations in conflict in North and West Africa. The conflicts in this region have become more difficult to resolve due to the complexities involved in the relationships between belligerents. Groups that are allied one day can fight each other the next and return to co-operation later still. New groups also arise, split and reunite in a somewhat unpredictable manner. The complexity of North and West African conflicts is further amplified by the fact that they are rarely limited to a single country, as in the Central Sahel and the Lake Chad region today. Thus far, the evolution of the complex relations between actors in conflict remains poorly understood. Because modern conflicts involve hundreds of versatile actors, mapping these networks of rivalries and alliances is a key step toward understanding the long-term prospects for political stability and designing policies that can put an end to the surging political violence in the region. Based on the network analysis, four main policy options are put forward in this chapter to improve the long-term political stability of North and West Africa.

This chapter examines the relationships between state and non-state actors within armed conflicts in Africa. These relations are an important part of the complexity of conflict within the region but remain poorly understood. The first section of the chapter shows that violent non-state organisations involved in conflicts are quite diverse when it comes to their objectives, legal status and visibility. The internal structure of each organisation can also vary tremendously: while some organisations favour a centralised structure in which decisions and resources flow from top to bottom, other organisations tend to be structured around decentralised and autonomous cells. The second section shows that significant volatility in Africa characterises the relationships between these organisations. Non-state violent actors dedicate a meaningful portion of their energy and resources to competing with each other instead of exclusively targeting the state. Alliances between them are rarer despite their obvious benefits in terms of co-ordination, resources and exchange of information. Rivalries between such groups are shaped by ideology, access to resources and political leverage, and divergences on the use of violence against civilians, among other factors.

Conflicts in North and West Africa are characterised by a high degree of complexity in which hundreds of rebel groups and violent extremist organisations are involved in a shifting series of alliances and rivalries with government forces and with each other. In order to map this complex conflict environment, this chapter develops a novel approach, known as dynamic social network analysis (DSNA) capable of modelling the creation and dissolution of ties, either positive or negative, among a violent group of actors over time. The DSNA approach relies on several metrics that show how co-operative and opposition networks evolve, change and adapt to foreign military interventions. The analysis of the evolution of conflict networks is conducted at the regional level (North and West Africa) and through three case studies (Mali and Central Sahel, Lake Chad, Libya). It leverages political event data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) that has catalogued violent extremist incidents in Africa since 1997.

This chapter examines how rivalries and alliances affect the long-term evolution of violence in North and West Africa. Building on a dataset of 36 760 violent events, the chapter maps how state and non-state actors are embedded in ever-changing opposition and co-operation networks (relations) from 1997 to 2020. The chapter shows thatthe number of belligerents has increased dramatically since 1997. Organisations in conflict form a loose network dominated by jihadist organisations in Mali, the Central Sahel and Lake Chad region and by government forces in Libya. This network is becoming increasingly dense and more centralised over time, a worrying trend that suggests that violence is more persistent than ever. The chapter also shows that alliances remain fragile and circumstantial, particularly among rebels and jihadist groups, whose political loyalties remain ambivalent. The decentralised structure of the co‑operation network is strikingly similar to the opposition network, suggesting that organisations are frequently shifting allegiances. Co‑operation has exhibited a slight upward trend since the mid-2010s, fuelled by regional military alliances in Mali and the Lake Chad region, and the consolidation of authority in Libya.

This chapter examines the impact of military interventions on conflict networks in North and West Africa. It illustrates that the French involvement in the Sahel, NATO’s Operation Unified Protector in Libya, and the joint offensive against Boko Haram around Lake Chad, were interventions that aimed to tip the balance of power to one side. None of these efforts, however, has achieved a lasting resolution to the violence that continues to tear apart North and West Africa. The impact of these interventions on conflict networks has been limited in duration and the jihadist and rebel organisations have strengthened following the initial shock. Finally, there has been an ever-increasing price paid by civilians in the region since 2010, reminding of the need for future interventions to act more in favour of protecting civilians.