Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most conflict-affected regions in the world. In 2021, 18 of 49 states experienced active armed conflict, and in 2022 the region accounted for nearly half of global conflicts. Countries such as Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria, and Mozambique continue to face election violence, civil wars, and Islamist insurgencies. At the same time, Africa is the most linguistically diverse continent on earth, with over 2,100 indigenous languages—more than a quarter of the world’s total.

For decades, researchers have linked armed conflict to ethnic and linguistic diversity. Language is often treated as a marker of group identity and division—something that fuels violence and complicates peacebuilding. But this view is incomplete. Most Africans are multilingual. People regularly navigate multiple languages in daily life, shifting between them depending on context, identity, and social relationships. Yet conflict research has largely ignored this reality. Instead, it relies on static measures of “language diversity” that overlook how multilingualism actually works on the ground.

This project is the first large-scale comparative study to examine how multilingual practices shape conflict and conflict resolution in Sub-Saharan Africa.

We bring together UK- and Africa-based academic and non-academic partners to analyze lived multilingual realities in conflict settings. Our research combines qualitative and quantitative methods to generate both cross-country evidence and in-depth case studies.