Colonial legacies and armed conflict around African national parks

Abstract National parks are essential for conservation efforts across Africa, and many were established during the colonial period. This colonial legacy is often cited as a driver of contemporary governance challenges and armed conflict. Yet, continent-wide, spatially explicit evidence linking the historical conditions of park establishment to present-day conflict dynamics remains limited. In this study, we explore the relationship between 414 national parks across Africa and violent events occurring within 15 kilometers of their boundaries, distinguishing between national parks with colonial origins and those established post-independence. We differentiate among three forms of armed violence: state-based, non-state, and one-sided. Using area-standardized generalized linear mixed models with a negative binomial error structure, we demonstrate that colonial-era national parks in Central and East Africa are associated with higher densities of conflict events and conflict-related fatalities. In Southern Africa, by contrast, this relationship appears to be reversed. Colonial national parks are also disproportionately associated with one-sided violence across Central, East, Southern, and West Africa, whereas post-colonial national parks more often exhibit patterns dominated by state-based and non-state violence in several regions. Although our analysis cannot establish causal relationships, it provides a spatially explicit, continental-scale assessment of how colonial-era park establishment correlates with contemporary armed conflict around national parks in Africa.