Source: Authors based on ACLED data (2024), Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, https://acleddata.com/.
In West Africa, violent events and fatalities are at a 20-year high. SWAC’s Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi) maps the evolution of this violence since the late 1990s. It identifies four types of conflict represented by the different coloured cells in the map. In 2023, clustered high-intensity conflict (the blue cells) accounted for 62% of all conflict cells. This indicates that violence is entrenched and intensifying locally across much of West Africa. The violence is often driven by local factors, such as political disputes between communities, access to shared natural resources or grievances left unaddressed by state authorities.
New SCDi metrics enable the identification of areas that have become newly violent. In 2023, the SCDi recorded 685 cells experiencing one of the four types of conflict. Of these cells, 23% had become newly violent since the previous year. Over the period 2022-23, there were 383 new cells in conflict, the majority of which are in West. Africa. Over the same period, 225 cells experienced violence for the first time since the early 2000s. Four countries – Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Nigeria – accounted for 68% of areas newly experiencing conflict. However, 11% of those areas were in Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea and Togo, highlighting the diffusion of violence from the Sahel to the Gulf of Guinea. Most violent events in these states were attacks against civilians (67%), followed by battles between armed groups (29%) and explosions or other forms of remote violence (4%).
