Why do wars in Africa displace so many people?
A data-driven dive into the terrorist nature of African warfare
Dear reader,
My name is Francesco Piccinelli Casagrande, and I am an Italian data journalist based in Brussels. In DaNumbers #2 I try to understand more about wars in Africa. I will start from the latest conflict to break into the news (the Mozambique war against Islamist militia in the North), and I will try to study the dynamics of conflict in the region trying to answer one question: why do so many people get displaced?
RZESZÓW, Poland - According to the United Nations, the crisis in Cabo Delgado (Northern Mozambique) could lead to 1,000,000 people being displaced. Such an estimation could sound realistic if we consider that between the beginning of the year and April 3 there were more than 90 engagements in the country. Yet there is something that does not completely fit. Let us look at the situation on the ground.
Between January 1 and April 3 (the timespan of the map) there had been more than 90 armed clashes. Some of them were about old conflicts (one attack by RENAMO, a local anti-communist group, for example). No armed clash yielded more than 15 fatalities, but the number of displaced people is of the hundreds of thousands. How can it be?
The map was designed using data from Acled, a research centre that pinpoints violent clashes globally and in near real-time, and Natural Earth an open database with geographical information.
The low number of fatalities is appalling if compared to European and Western history events. During WWI, the First Battle of the Marne led to 152,700 deaths in six days. The entire Mozambique conflict led to 2,997 fatalities since 2017 and over 1,349 events. The attacks of September 11, in comparison, caused 2,977 fatalities in one day and two locations (D.C. and New York).
The conflict of Mozambique is not an exception in Africa. The mean number of casualties by a single event in the Continent had been around two since 2016 and, although the war in Mozambique is slightly more lethal than the average African conflict, it is not different from other wars elsewhere.
As the chart above shows, Mozambique fits within the standard deviation of the mean of fatalities per clash. The standard deviation is the area of the plot where cases not particularly close to the mean are more likely to be. Besides Mozambique, DaNumbers studied four other countries based on their different localization and historical relevance.
Among those cases, only Niger approaches five mean deaths per clash. Mozambique is notable - even considering the battle of Palma (Cabo Delgado), a group of clashes between March 21 and April 3 - because it follows the same trajectory as South Sudan.
The reported number of displaced people (In Mozambique, Amnesty International and the U.N. report 530,000 already displaced) looks disproportionally high relative to conflict fatalities. The number of displaced people is high all over Africa, and there are countries where people get displaced massively.
In the previous chart, DaNumbers calculated, on average, how many people got displaced yearly per country. Data are from the Global Internal Displacement Database, a research centre that pools multiple data sources together to get estimations on people who lost their home because of wars or natural disasters.
The above chart asks more questions than it answers. This story assumes that African conflicts displace a lot of people. The chart above, on the other hand, tells that there are specific countries where there are a lot of individuals displaced because of war.
Ethiopia is ideal-typical under this aspect: on average, every year between 2016 and 2019, 1,242,000 million people lost their homes there. Countries like South Sudan, Nigeria, and Somalia follow.
Given how fragmented is the African political scene, isn’t that we were looking to the wrong side of the problem? If there are countries which such a disproportionate number of displaced people, does it depend on the regime ruling these countries?
The answer is no. The above chart takes into account data from Vdem, a Swedish research centre that studies democracy, and from the Global Internal Displacement Database. It shows that the number of internally displaced people does not really depend on the regime type of countries. Nigeria, for example, is a democracy, yet, it is the third by the mean yearly number of new displacements.
Maybe, chasing outliers was not a very good idea. According to the chart above, only one country passed the one million mark of newly displaced individuals between 2016 and 2019, and it is Ethiopia. There, three million people lost their home in 2018 alone.
If Ethiopia is the exception, what do other countries have in common? The answer is the nature of the conflict fought within their borders.
According to the chart above, the majority of war events had to do with some sort of grass-root violence. Protests, attacks on civilians and battles represent 73% of all engagement between 2016 and 2020. Things get worse over time.
The chart above computes the total number of clashes divided by the Acled taxonomy. According to these data, over time protests and violence against civilians increased their role considerably. In 2016 there were 4,142 protests, in 2021 9,550. In 2016 civilians were attacked 3,310 times, in 2020 5,141.
These numbers explain that wars in Africa are not the kind of war people imagine. Warfare, here, looks like a street fight among gangs that terrifies the population, rather than an organized set of events and battles leading to a stable political outcome.
The terror effect of the African warfare is evident in the above chart. On the horizontal axis, there is the number of clashes; on the vertical axis, we have how many people got displaced. On average, each event is responsible for 141 people losing their homes.
Although this data visualization has some outliers like Ethiopia (2018) or South Sudan (2017), other countries validate the hypothesis that people are terrified by wars: violence in Africa is so ruthless, limited, and so personally close, that people flee, even if this means living in the countryside or an improvised refugee camp.
The above chart sheds some further light on this aspect, showing the relation between mean conflict deaths (horizontal axis) and people being displaced (vertical axis). Here the difference in the order of magnitude is so high that it is confusing: each death in conflict forces 96,000 people to flee. These numbers are the final evidence of how conflicts work in Africa.
The different guerrilla movements do not want to kill as many people as they can: what they want is to scare the hell out of civilians so that militias can impose their (loose) rule on relatively small regions.
In facts, it is not even granted that those rebel groups can even hold control of the areas they conquered, as it happened in Mozambique in the last few weeks: the local Islamist militia took control of an area, a few days later the legitimate government took it back.
Apparently, none appears to be strong enough to prevent this kind of conflict to arise in the first place. This means that people will be dying and losing their homes in the global indifference unless they start landing en masse on the external borders of Europe.
Thanks for your attention, and see you in two weeks.
Francesco