events are contextually-defined and may not involve actual violence. With these inclusion criteria, our final sample of ACLED data include 214,534 unique conflict events in Africa between 1998 and 2022. 45% of these events are protests and riots, 24% are battles, and 23% involve civilian targeting (violence against civilians), approximately.

We rely on ACLED’s interaction codes to measure the presence and extent of different forms of civilian targeting in and around protected areas in our sample. ACLED events with interaction codes ending in 7 designate violence against civilians and thus form the basis of our civilian targeting outcome. ACLED events with an interaction code of 27 designate rebel-led attacks on civilians and thus form the basis of our rebel-perpetrated civilian targeting outcome. ACLED events with an interaction code of 17 designate government-led attacks on civilians and thus form the basis of our government-perpetrated civilian targeting outcome. ACLED events with an interaction code of 37 or 47 designate militia-led attacks on civilians and thus form the basis of our militia-perpetrated civilian targeting outcome. ACLED recorded 49,287 instances of civilian targeting in Africa between 1998 and 2022. 23% of these events were perpetrated by rebel groups, 23% were perpetrated by government forces, and 64% were perpetrated by militias, approximately.

Our temporal unit of observation is the year, and our spatial unit of observation is the area within a protected area’s boundaries plus the area contained within a 25kilometer buffer of a protected area’s boundaries. Figure S13 displays results for each of our three conflict measures.

As with our tourism analysis, we primarily use binary measures of conflict in order to reduce measurement error stemming from reporting bias. Imagine there is no difference in the annual level of conflict experienced between AP and governmentmanaged protected areas, yet we estimate a positive effect because AP makes it easier for media sources to detect and report on conflict events. This possibility suggests the different annual levels of conflict we observe between AP and government-managed areas may be inaccurate. By comparison, differences in the presence of conflict between the two groups should be less susceptible to reporting bias, so long as AP does not change the probability of media outlets detecting and reporting on any conflict at all. We support this assumption by documenting that AP management does not affect the presence of any form of conflict on average (Figure S15). Focusing on the presence (or onset) of conflict also aligns with prior research investigating armed group behavior [108, 109].

# **A.6.1 Understanding the Increase in the Presence of Civilian Targeting (Figure S17)**

Why might AP management increase the probability of violence against civilians (Table S3 and Figure S13a)? We propose that AP management restricts the ability of armed groups to generate revenue via natural resource extraction, subsequently displacing armed groups’ revenue generation activities towards the civilian population (e.g., kidnapping and extortion). If AP’s increased capacity for monitoring and enforcement is displacing armed groups’ revenue generation activities, then some of the conflict events we observe in and around AP’s protected areas should involve armed 11