The Geography of Repression: Mapping Territorial Control and Clandestine Violence

Understanding where violence occurs remains an open question in conflict research, especially regarding its less visible and covert forms. While prior studies highlight accountability pressures, they rarely consider the spatial foundations of control that enable such repression. We introduce a new approach for estimating actor control maps from multiple georeferenced conflict datasets, using geometric interpolation between battle sites to delineate frontlines, contested zones, and areas of dominance. Applying this method to ten Sub-Saharan African countries, we merge our spatial estimates with peacekeeping deployment data to examine how control structures shape patterns of clandestine violence. We hypothesise that abductions and disappearances occur not in contested spaces but within areas of consolidated state control, particularly where international monitoring is present. Our results show that clandestine violence clusters within these controlled and closely observed regions, suggesting that the concealment of repression depends on both territorial dominance and the proximity of accountability mechanisms.