Characterizing ethnic interactions from human communication patterns in Ivory Coast

Towards the consolidation of peace and national development, Ivory Coast must overcome the lack of cohesion, responsible for the emergence of two civil wars in the last years. As in many African countries, ethnic violence is a result of the way territories are organized and the prevalence of some groups over others. Nowadays the increasing availability of electronic data allows to quantify and unveil societal relationships in an unprecedented way. In this sense, the present work analyzes mobile phone data in order to provide information about the regional and ethnic interactions in Ivory Coast. We accomplish so by means of the construction and analysis of complex social networks with several types of interactions, such as calling activity and human mobility. We found that in a subregional scale, the ethnic identity plays an important role in the communication patterns, while at the interregional scale, other factors arise like economical interests and available infrastructure.