Report

Crime, terror and insecurity in Nigeria

This report from UK think tank RUSI takes bottom-up perceptions of violence as a starting point for analysing northern Nigeria’s threat landscape.

Nigeria faces numerous security threats: from high rates of violent crime and enduring kidnap-for-ransom issues to long-running insurgencies in the northeast and a metastasising banditry problem in the northwest. Local assessments of these dynamics are often contested across demography and geography, at times feeding on a mix of context-specific tensions and historical inequalities. Given the influence such perspectives can have on the success and efficacy of interventions, it is essential to better understand grassroots experiences of insecurity and their associated pathways of change.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted across Borno, Yobe and Kaduna, this report takes bottom-up perceptions of violence as a starting point for analysing northern Nigeria’s threat landscape, exploring how organised crime, terrorism and other forms of insecurity are perceived at the subnational and local level. Much of the analysis is based on interview and focus group data, incorporating existing literature to caveat and contextualise respondent contributions (where possible) within a wider body of evidence. Such insights offer valuable entry points for interrogating the mechanisms that feed into and facilitate violence, and for identifying the implications they raise for domestic stakeholders and foreign donors.