Distance, Borders, and Time: The Diffusion and Permeability of Political Violence in North and West Africa

This paper explores the spatial and temporal diffusion of political violence in North and West Africa. It does so by endeavoring to represent the mental landscape that lives in the back of a group leader’s mind as he contemplates strategic targeting. We assume that this representation is a combination of the physical geography of the target environment, and the mental and physical cost of following a seemingly random pattern of attacks. Focusing on the distance and time between attacks and taking into consideration the transaction costs that state boundaries impose, we wish to understand what constrains a group leader to attack at a location other than the one that would seem to yield the greatest overt payoff. By its very nature, the research problem defies the collection of a full set of structural data. Instead, we leverage functional data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED) dataset that, inter alia, meticulously catalogues violent extremist incidents in North and West Africa since 1997, to generate a network whose nodes are administrative regions. These nodes are connected by edges of qualitatively different types: undirected edges representing geographic distance, undirected edges representing borders, and directed edges representing consecutive attacks by the same group at the two endpoints. We analyze the resulting network using novel spectral embedding techniques that are able to account fully for the different types of edges. The result is a “map” of North and West Africa that depicts the permeability to violence. A better understanding of how location, time, and borders condition attacks enables planning, prepositioning, and response.