Visualizing Armed Groups: The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s M23 in Focus

Cathy Nangini; Mainak Jas; Hugo L Fernandes; Robert Muggah

doi:10.5334/sta.dd

Visualizing Armed Groups: The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s M23 in Focus

Stability: International Journal of Security and Development

Volume 3 (2014): Issue 1

By: Cathy Nangini, Mainak Jas, Hugo L Fernandes and Robert Muggah

Open Access

|Feb 2014

Abstract

New information technologies can help unpack the relationships and tendencies that persist in complex networks. We present an interactive, web-based visualization that captures interlocking networks related to the Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23) rebel group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to demonstrate the utility of visually summarizing relationships in a multi-dimensional dataset. We draw exclusively from the findings the UN Group of Governmental Experts report S/2012/843 documenting the procurement of weapons and ammunition by the M23 network. The visualization was built using a hierarchical edge bundling algorithm (Holten 2006) implemented in Data-Driven Documents (d3) (Bostock 2011), an open-source JavaScript-based library for interactive web visualizations. We contend that such visualizations can provide improved understanding of complex social networks both within and beyond the confines of war.

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Articles in this issue

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/sta.dd | Journal eISSN: 2165-2627

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Language: English

Published on: Feb 10, 2014

Published by: Department of Peace Studies and International Development, University of Bradford

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

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© 2014 Cathy Nangini, Mainak Jas, Hugo L Fernandes, Robert Muggah, published by Department of Peace Studies and International Development, University of Bradford
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Volume 3 (2014): Issue 1