This memo explores transnational conflict in Africa. Section I is concerned with the wide (and under-acknowledged) extent and pattern of conflict between states and across borders, and how it may be researched. Section II is concerned with the implications for policy.
The memo summarises and expands upon two papers on transnational armed conflict in Africa. The first is an occasional paper that introduces a new dataset; the second is a peer-reviewed published paper that re-describes patterns of armed conflicts in Africa on the basis of this dataset. The core finding of the papers is that existing datasets have systematically under-represented the level of transnational political violence (covert war, militarised disputes, support to state and non-state belligerents in ‘internal’ war and sponsorship of coups d’état and the suppression of coups) to such a significant degree that we need fundamentally to reconsider the received wisdom that Africa has experienced many civil wars and very few inter-state wars. The elaborated findings focus on the patterns of transnational conflict: how it varies from one African sub-region to another, how it has changed over time, and how different states pursue their strategies for transnational conflict in different ways.
