Madagascar

Madagascar has a roughly even-chance minority risk (about 36%) of direct involvement in significant armed conflict within three years, driven mainly by domestic political-military instability and episodic lethal violence rather than interstate war.

Risk concentrates in Antananarivo around transition governance, protest cycles, and crowd-control decisions. The key near-term escalation indicator is security-force fragmentation: disobedience calls, rival deployments, or competing chains of command. Rural banditry/dahalo violence will remain high with periodic deadly spikes and occasional security-force firefights; terrorism remains a low-probability concern in official security assessments.

Over five years, risk hinges on whether the transition produces credible elections and re-subordinates elite units and internal security forces to durable civilian oversight. If legitimacy remains contested and coercive capacity rises, Madagascar could see repeated urban lethal episodes and more militarized internal operations. If mediation and normalization restore financing and governance performance, conflict risk should trend down, though armed criminality and climate-linked stressors will persist.

Bottom line Madagascar’s three-year conflict risk is primarily internal and event-driven. The most plausible “significant armed conflict” scenario is a short-to-medium duration episode of sustained armed clashes in Antananarivo and key regional cities during a contested transition milestone, especially if rival security elements mobilize. Interstate war remains a low-probability tail risk.

Threat drivers Political legitimacy and transition management remain the central variables. Reporting since late 2025 describes large protests, fatalities, curfews, and a formal transitional arrangement, all consistent with a volatile bargaining environment where miscalculation can produce lethal escalation. A key accelerant is security-force cohesion: CAPSAT’s repeated political role and fresh reporting of calls for disobedience increase the probability of factional splits, which is the main mechanism that can convert unrest into sustained armed engagements.

A second driver is armed criminality and weak territorial control outside major cities. Multiple official and commercial security sources describe widespread highway banditry and recurrent dahalo–security force firefights, with indications of greater firearm prevalence and allegations of security-force complicity. This is typically decentralized crime, but it can meet the “significant armed conflict” threshold if operations become sustained, retaliatory, and geographically expansive, or if political actors instrumentalize armed groups amid a legitimacy crisis.

External security partnerships are a modifier. Claims of increased Russian security cooperation, if accurate, are more likely to raise coercive capacity and lethality in domestic confrontations than to create external war.

Resilience and systemic firebreaks Madagascar’s island geography limits cross-border insurgent logistics and regional spillover. Terrorism risk is consistently assessed as low in mainstream official security reporting. The state’s limited power-projection capacity constrains interstate escalation, including over the Îles Éparses dispute, which continues to track as diplomatic/legal contention rather than kinetic conflict. Regional and international engagement (AU/SADC-style diplomacy and bilateral partners) provides off-ramps that often shorten crises.

Net assessment (3 years) New reporting strengthens the case that security-force cohesion and transition legitimacy remain fragile, modestly increasing the likelihood of sustained lethal episodes. Offsetting firebreaks still favor episodic unrest over civil war. Updated probability: 36%.