On the geography of contentious collective action in Africa

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Despite the decline of war, Africa appears to be becoming a more violent place. While the number of major civil wars and armed conflicts occurring on the continent has declined over the last two decades, the overall frequency of small-scale armed conflicts and other variegated forms of contentious collective action has increased. How do we explain this? I investigated two processes that might shed some light on this question. First, Africa is undergoing a period of political and institutional transition as regimes embrace multiparty democracy and maintain power by forming inclusive ruling coalitions. This process, it is argued, has changed the incentives surrounding armed conflict and the use of violence among social groups. Concurrent to this process of democratisation, Africa is experiencing rapid urbanisation which is transforming the continent and is thought to have caused changes in the patterns and nature of expression of contentious collective action.Through a series of five essays, my PhD supported claims surrounding a decline in the most severe forms of armed conflict on the continent and the rise of other, less intense forms of contentious action such as riots and protests. However, I found no evidence to suggest that the geography of conflict is becoming more urban in character. Rather, I showed that, linked to parallel trends in urbanisation and democratisation, conflict is becoming more spatially diffuse and generally less intense.The aims of this Fellowship are twofold. First it consolidates the impact of my PhD work through academic publications, conference presentations, and engagement with policy and academic stakeholders. Second, it facilitates my career progression by developing programme of future work that, building upon my PhD research, investigates the complex relationships between environmental change/hazards, urbanization, politics, and conflict in African cities.I will prepare and submit three unpublished manuscripts from my PhD thesis to high impact academic journals. The first, deploys novel theory and methods to investigate the role of cabinet composition in reducing armed conflict within a sample of African countries. The second, deploys new techniques for spatio-temporal analysis to understand the distribution of violence in Africa. The third, presents the African Cities Dataset (ACD) which, as the first dataset of its kind, measures the spatial, demographic, environmental, and political attributes of urban areas in Africa. I will also present the latter two articles to academic beneficiaries at the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers and the American Political Science Association.Additionally, I will convene a workshop for members of the UK aid and development sectors to maximise the policy impact of my PhD research. The workshop will demonstrate the ACD as a tool for policy development and analysis, generate case studies from users, and better understand the needs of non-academic users to inform future iterations of the dataset.Finally, this fellowship outlines future research programme building upon my PhD research to interrogate the causal pathways linking environmental and demographic change to urban politics and security in Africa. This represents a novel interdisciplinary and mixed quantitative methods approach to answering questions surrounding the consequences of environmental change and Africa's urban transition on security and politics across the continent. Funding applications will be summitted to the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and the ESRC New Investigator Grant. I will complete a 10-day visit to the Peace Research Institute Oslo to extend my professional network, discuss research ideas with high profile academics, and explore the potential for collaborations. I will also complete methods training at the Essex Summer School to improve my research skills in survey experiment design and analysis and machine learning.