We introduce a technique for the analysis of general spatially coupled systems that are governed by scalar recursions. Such systems can be expressed in variational form in terms of a potential function. We show, under mild conditions, that the potential function is displacement convex and that the minimizers are given by the fixed points (FPs) of the recursions. Furthermore, we give the conditions on the system such that the minimizing FP is unique up to translation along the spatial direction. The condition matches with that of Kudekar et al. [20] for the existence of spatial FPs. Displacement convexity applies to a wide range of spatially coupled recursions appearing in coding theory, compressive sensing, random constraint satisfaction problems, as well as statistical-mechanics models. We illustrate it with applications to low-density parity-check (LDPC) and generalized LDPC codes used for the transmission on the binary erasure channel or general binary memoryless symmetric channels within the Gaussian reciprocal channel approximation as well as compressive sensing.