The African Geopolitical Risk Index: A Daily, Country-Level Measure for Fifty-Four Countries, 1979–2026

Abstract

I introduce the African Geopolitical Risk Index, the first daily, country-level measure of geopolitical risk built specifically for the African continent. The index covers all fifty-four African countries from 1979 to 2026, and is constructed from the global news-event record rather than from a small panel of Western newspapers. For each country and each day I measure the share of that country’s news-event coverage that reports conflict or threat, separating the verbal expression of hostility, which I label threats, from its material realization, which I label acts. The measure is article-weighted, so that episodes commanding wide coverage carry more weight than those mentioned in passing, and it is expressed as a share of total coverage, so that it captures the intensity of conflict in the news rather than the overall volume of news. I normalize each series to a common reference window so that levels are comparable over time and across countries, and I produce the index at four levels of aggregation: a continent-wide headline, a separate series for every country, five regional aggregates, and a threats-versus-acts decomposition. I describe two complementary constructions: a long-history, event-based index drawn from the GDELT Event Database and coded through the CAMEO conflict taxonomy, and a modern, fully multilingual, theme-based index drawn from the GDELT Global Knowledge Graph.

Keywords: geopolitical risk; Africa; news-based index; GDELT; conflict; CAMEO; text-based measurement; political risk. JEL: D74, F51, O55, C43, G15.

How to cite

@techreport{iddouch2026africa,
  author      = {Iddouch, Karim},
  title       = {The African Geopolitical Risk Index: A Daily, Country-Level Measure for Fifty-Four Countries, 1979--2026},
  institution = {International University of Casablanca},
  type        = {Working paper},
  year        = {2026},
  url         = {https://ssrn.com/abstract=7002698}
}

The data documented in this paper are free to download from the Data Center. Methodology summary: how we measure geopolitical risk.