Conflict Trends (no. 33): Real-time analysis of African political violence, January 2015
Welcome to the January issue of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project’s (ACLED) Conflict Trends report. Each month, ACLED researchers gather, analyse and publish data on political violence in Africa in realtime. Weekly updates to realtime conflict event data are published through our research partners at Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) and also on the ACLED website. This month, ACLED launched Version 5: a fully revised and updated conflict ev
Terrorism in Africa: A bigger threat than in Europe, but much less coverage
Are African lives worth less than the lives of people elsewhere in the world? Last week 17 people were killed by terrorists in France. The events were shocking and quite rightly the murders were subject to unequivocal condemnation. At the same time, considerably more people were reported to have been killed by gunmen in Baga, Nigeria, with figures ranging from 150 to over 2,000. But it’s the French victims who we focus on, showing our solidarity with them by declaring ‘Je sui
The twilight of the resource curse?
FOR decades commodity prices have shaped Africa’s economic growth. The continent is home to a third of the planet’s mineral reserves, a tenth of the oil and it produces two-thirds of the diamonds. Little wonder then that, as a rule, when prices for natural resources and export crops have been high, growth has been good; when they have dipped, so has the continent’s economy (see chart 1). Over the past decade Africa was among the world’s fastest-growing continents—its average
