  Modern armed conflicts have a tendency to cluster together and spread
geographically. However, the geography of most conflicts remains under-studied.
To fill this gap, this article presents a new indicator that measures two key
geographical properties of subnational political violence: the conflict
intensity within a region on the one hand, and the spatial distribution of
conflict within a region on the other. We demonstrate the indicator in North
and West Africa between 1997 to 2019 to show that it can clarify how conflicts
can spread from place to place and how the geography of conflict changes over
time.
