armed conflict political violence sub saharan africa

Insecurity is increasingly driven by the reoccurrence of conflicts in some countries rather than by the emergence of “new” ones.

This requires new regional and international responses to strengthening the security of African citizens. Simultaneously, however, the nature of security threats has substantially changed. This result is robust even when controlling for factors such as childhood exposure to parent violence and the husband’s alcohol consumption.The African continent has made great strides in reducing the number of violent conflicts since the end of the Cold War. Individual-level analyses show that there is an independent, significant effect of armed conflict intensity in the home region of the respondent as regards her risk of experiencing IPSV. Combining subnational data on armed conflict events with individual-level data on partner abuse from DHS surveys in 17 Sub-Saharan African countries for a total of 95,913 women aged 15-49, I analyse the impact of conflict intensity on intimate partner sexual violence (IPSV). Drawing on psychological theories, this paper argues that armed conflict can have negative consequences for sexual violence in the private sphere. The consequences of a conflict in terms of sexual violence are not limited to the abuses performed by conflict actors, nor are they limited to the period when the conflict was active.

Although the majority of the direct victims of war are men, women face more insidious challenges, such as difficulty in providing for families and coping with sexual violence. While the study of the causes of civil conflict is a well-established sub-discipline in the conflict literature, less is known about how political violence affects society.

Armed conflict political violence sub saharan africa