Wars Without Beginning or End: Violent Political Organizations and Irregular Warfare in the Sahel-Sahara

This article examines the structure and spatial patterns of violent political organizations in the Sahel-Sahara, a region characterized by growing political instability over the last 20 years. Drawing on a public collection of disaggregated data, the article uses network science to represent alliances and conflicts of 179 organizations that were involved in violent events between 1997 and 2014. To this end, we combine two spectral embedding techniques that have previously been considered separately: one for directed graphs (relationships are asymmetric), and one for signed graphs (relationships are positive or negative). Our result show that groups that are net attackers are indistinguishable at the level of their individual behavior, but clearly separate into proand anti-political violence based on the groups to which they are close. The second part of the article maps a series of 389 events related to nine Trans-Saharan Islamist groups between 2004 and 2014. Spatial analysis suggests that cross-border movement has intensified following the establishment of military bases by AQIM in Mali but reveals no evidence of a border ‘sanctuary’. Owing to the transnational nature of conflict, the article shows that national management strategies and foreign military interventions have profoundly affected the movement of Islamist groups. Acknowledgments We are grateful to Larry Brooks, Dimitris Christopoulos, Alistair Edgar, Colin Flint, and Clionadh Raleigh. Alexandra Green and Marie Hugo-Persson provided valuable technical assistance. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, on 19-20 March 2015, and at the Workshop on Subnational Governance and Conflict at the University of Sussex on 22 May 2015.