Introducing the transnational conflict in Africa dataset

This occasional paper is the counterpart to the paper, ‘Redescribing Transnational Conflict in Africa’ (Twagiramungu et al. 2019). It introduces the transnational conflict in Africa (TCA) dataset, which can be used to study the neglected transnational dimensions of armed conflicts in Africa. The TCA dataset is built by combining, augmenting, and revising several existing datasets, each of which captures some elements of transnational conflict, including interstate wars, external state support in interstate wars, low-intensity confrontations between states, external interventions in civil wars, and external support to rebels or coup-makers. The methodology underlying the TCA is explained and some descriptive statistics concerning the dimensions of transnational conflict in Africa are presented. The final section discusses some challenges and concludes that the conventional wisdom that Africa has experienced little interstate conflict is misleading. In order to fully explain the internationality of wars in Africa, including so-called ‘civil wars’ as well as other forms of political violence such as military coups, one needs to look at regional and interstate dynamics, as opposed to solely dynamics within a country.