Africa is a region in tumult: this much anyone can figure out. Political scientists and sociologists all attribute Africa’s civil unrest to a number of economic, cultural, and anthropological factors. Data was recently made public by ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project). We used Signals to focus in on the influences of several movements and organizations on civil unrest in Africa. You can view the ACLED analysis here.
Civil Unrest in Africa
Signals processed over 117,000 reports of civil unrest from 1996–2016 in one form or another from nearly every African country, mining police databases, military reports, and civilian logs to generate visual and graphical representations of conflicts all over the continent. Using this tool, we can come to a number of conclusions about the state of civil unrest in this fabulously diverse, yet markedly tense region.
The Influence of Islamism
Just how prevalent is Islamism in Africa? Prevalent enough to be the leading cause of civil unrest in the continent.
Category Overview
Nearly 30 percent of reported conflicts involve an Islamist organization. Out of the top six categories of responses, three involve Islamist groups of one kind or another — politically influential Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood or Al-Qaeda/ISIL-affiliated terrorist groups like Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria. No single unifying ideological factor is as influential in the civil unrest reports.
Arab World Flare-Ups
We can easily observe that there has been a recent, multi-year spike in civil unrest.
Temporal Trends
In late 2010 and 2011, protests erupted all over the Arab World — including North Africa — that led to the ousting of several dictatorships and an era of tension between the established order and Western-leaning youth and intellectuals. Naturally, such an event would lead to a rise in civil unrest among North African countries, so we hypothesize that this “Arab Spring” has something to do with it.
Let’s use Geo to determine if we have a data-driven basis for this inference. The Geo widget locates the geographical source of each data file and forms a map, or a list, of where our responses are coming from. The “Sparkline” feature (on the right) of the widget allows us to see a brief glimpse of when the responses were made as well.
As our powerful Geo widget shows, Somalia is the largest source of civil unrest on the continent. The ‘unknown’ areas of Somalia, as well as the Banaadir region are the largest areas.
Examining the rest of the continent, we identified the massive wave of post-Arab Spring unrest as a major contributor to the recent spike in civil unrest across Africa.
Acts of Violence
In many cases, we’re not just interested in reports of conflict but also in the nature of those conflicts — notably, whether they were violent or not. We asked Signals to delve into fatality data to gauge the differences between the sources of violent and nonviolent civil unrest.
Shown above are two separate “Top Contributor profiles”, or lists of the sources most active in reporting civil unrest in Africa. The profile on the left shows the top contributors among all reports of civil unrest; the one on the right shows only the top contributors among reports of civil unrest that resulted in no fatalities (68.9 percent of all reports).
Among the nonviolent reports (defined here as “zero fatalities”), reports from protester sources dominated the top contributors, while among all reporters, reports from protester sources, military sources, and terrorist group sources were found in about equal measure, suggesting that protester groups generally engage in comparatively less violent behavior than military and terrorist groups. So we can see through the Signals engine that there are important distinctions in types of civil unrest that may affect our opinions of the conflict.
Using Signals, we were able to process over 100,000 reports of civil unrest across Africa and generate sweeping insights as to the nature and sources of the conflicts. Our analytics engine can process any amount of unstructured data, gathered from an established source (Open Data, Social Media, Ecommerce sites, Forums, Emails, etc.) or uploaded on your own .csv file, making sense of vast stores of information wherever they come from. Armed with the power and versatility of the Signals engine, who needs a political scientist?
This blog post focused on the open ACLED data. Also read our recent post on Smart Cities, using an Open Data source in the U.S.
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