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The least violent states include both Niger and Chad, despite being located in the very violent Sahel belt. The typically low violence rates of Eritrea, Republic of Congo and Botswana result from both functional democratic systems (e.g. Botswana) and repressive central regimes with strong suppression of opposition (e.g. Republic of Congo, Eritrea).

Rioting in 2010 is believed to have increased largely due to food crises experienced throughout the continent. However, rioting at present is increasing at rates comparable to the main types of political violence – barring communal activity which is largely stable, and rebel activity which is declining.

This graph clearly indicates that the main form of violence on the African continent is no longer civil war, and has not been since 2002 when political militias stepped into the role of the main non-state agents of political violence. The motivations of militia activity are distinctly different from rebel activity, and may indicate a profound change in the nature of African violence, but not necessarily its effect on civilians.

Over the past 17 years, political violence rates have grown. This graph displays how discrete types of violence have divergent patterns driven by different conditions across countries. In generally, violence rates stabilized from 1997-2010, yet 2011 and 2012 represent dramatic increases in violence. While this in part due to increases in violence in normally stable states- including North African countries, and the continued violence in large, unstable states- including Somalia, DR-Congo and Sudan, it is also due to the ability to harness information in a real-time coding environment, while the previous data were collected well after their occurrence.

1999 (followed closely by 2012) witnessed the highest proportion of battles between armed actors, largely due to violence in Angola, DRC and Sierra Leone. 2002 witnessed the highest proportion of violence against civilians, driven by several contexts including the Zimbabwean elections, Ugandan LRA activity, and the cessation of civil war in DRC which drove violence against civilians before peace talks. 2012 represents the highest proportion of riots, largely due to the North African activities, but also points to a general rise throughout Africa of civic protest. While each of these examples are true representations of violence in those states, they cannot speak to the overall story of violence on the continent, which is in fact a combination of these diverse narratives and processes.

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Political violence takes multiple forms with several types of groups interacting with each other. We have chosen the ten most common types found across Africa and display their respective proportion in event count and fatality counts. From this analysis, Government-Rebel battles comprise over 30% of the total events, but are responsible for 45% of all reported fatalities.

Contrary to assumptions that civilians bear the brunt of political violence across Africa, reported fatality levels for ‘Violence Against Civilians’ by distinct actors including militias and rebels suggest that they are responsible for fewer fatalities than those involving active combatants. However, this may also reflect poorly reported fatality information, common in unstable states, including an under-reporting of civilian casualties and an over-reporting of combatant fatalities by opposing parties.

Outside of Government-Rebel interactions, there is no correlation between the frequency of events and the total number of fatalities in which it results.

ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset) is designed for disaggregated conflict analysis and crisis mapping. This dataset codes the location of all reported conflict events in 50 countries in the developing world.