The Atlantic.
There have been hundreds – maybe thousands – of armed conflicts throughout Africa between 1997 and 2011. A new map shows them all.
Created by design student Francisco Dans
and the Center for Spatial Analysis at University College London, the
map shows in vivid, horrible detail the overwhelming number of armed
conflicts that have taken place over just a 15 year period.
The
conflicts are divided into four categories: violence against civilians
(red), riots/protests (blue), battles (green) and other (yellow). Some
are a combination (purples and oranges), and each dot on the map is
based on news reports documenting the conflicts. Clicking through to the original map and hovering over a dot there reveals brief details about each conflict.
Beyond the sheer number of conflicts is their geography. The majority
of these events took place along an equatorial band, concentrating
largely in countries like Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, Burundi
and Somalia. There are also a few hotspots in northern Africa in
Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt – the battlegrounds of the so-called
Arab Spring and its aftermath. A notable bright red spot exists in
Zimbabwe, where there have been numerous reports of violence against
civilians.
It's pretty depressing, but also a very important picture of turmoil at a continental scale.
