I will be conducting my research with my mentor Dr. Olivier Walther. This research will be under the University of Florida's Geography Department. With this project at hand, I will be spending one year extrapolating and compiling data.

 

The objective of my project is to examine to what extent violence involving pastoralists is more or less concentrated in border regions in West Africa. In the Spring of 2024, I will: (1) review the literature dedicated to pastoralism and conflict in the region, (2) formulate a research question and corresponding hypothesis, (3) identify the best tools to map violent events involving pastoralists, (4) analyze the results, and (5) present my results as a report and as a blog on my mentor’s lab website. The data used in this project were collected by the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) in West Africa. The data is part of the Transhumance Tracking Tool deployed in several countries of the region to track violence involving pastoralist communities. The methodology used in this project is spatial analysis, a quantitative approach to spatial features such as locations, that is well adapted to study the location of violent activities. I will be using a combination of statistical programs such as Excel to manage the data and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to visualize my data. My work will be supervised by Associate Professor Olivier Walther from the Department of Geography, who is currently leading a research program on the Spatial Evolution of Conflicts in North and West Africa at the University of Florida.