Insurgents Avoid the Economic Core: A Population-Weighted Test of the State-Capacity Conjecture in Three African Insurgencies

For fifteen years the state-capacity literature has conjectured that wealthy regions are better protected from insurgency, but the claim could not be separated from a simpler one — that violence merely avoids people. We supply the first test at a resolution that distinguishes them. Using UCDP-GED event coordinates for three unrelated African insurgencies– JNIM in the Sahel, Boko Haram/ISWAP around Lake Chad, and al Shabaab in the Horn– across ten countries, we build for each country the distribution of economic geography as its residents actually experience it, and locate insurgent violence within it. Insurgent events occur farther from economic hubs than other violence in the same countries (median 25.3 km vs. 17.4 km; n = 20,987; Mann-Whitney z = 13.5). Against the population baseline they sit at the 71st percentile of the population’s own distance-to-hub distribution, with 84.9% of events occurring farther from a hub than the median resident lives. Replacing the binary settlement measure with continuous gridded GDP returns the same result on the economy directly: insurgent events sit in the lower third of the population’s GDP-density distribution, with 72.7% occurring at lower economic output than the median resident lives at. The pattern holds in all ten countries individually and in all three insurgencies. Two independent operationalizations of the economic core– settlement form and dollars of output– agree: insurgent violence avoids economic output beyond what avoiding population explains. This is the first direct test, at a resolution capable of separating the two, of the long-standing conjecture that wealthy regions are better protected by state power.