Nigeria Security Tracker
from Africa Program and Nigeria on the Brink

Nigeria Security Tracker

The Council on Foreign Relations' Nigeria Security Tracker was an effort to catalog and map political violence based on a weekly survey of Nigerian and international press. The last update to the tracker was July 1, 2023. The data presented included violent incidents related to political, economic, and social grievances directed at the state or other affiliated groups (or, conversely, the state employing violence to respond to those incidents.)

Last updated July 1, 2023 1:30 pm (EST)

Tracker

The Nigeria Security Tracker (NST) was a project of the Council on Foreign Relations' Africa program. It documented and mapped violence in Nigeria motivated by political, economic, or social grievances. The data was updated through July 1, 2023.

 

 

Methodology

More From Our Experts

The Nigeria Security Tracker (NST) tracked violence both causal and symptomatic of Nigeria’s political instability and citizen alienation. The data was based on weekly surveys of Nigerian and international media through July 1, 2023.

More on:

Nigeria

Wars and Conflict

Conflict Prevention

Boko Haram

Violent Nonstate Actors

The data started with May 29, 2011, the date of Goodluck Jonathan’s inauguration as president. It was an event that highlighted the increasing bifurcation of the country on regional and religious lines.

Relying on press reports of violence presents methodological limitations. There is a dearth of accurate reporting across certain regions, death tolls are imprecise, and accounts of incidents vary. There is the potential for political manipulation of media. Given these limitations, the NST made every effort to collect information from multiple sources. Nevertheless, NST statistics should be viewed as indicative rather than definitive. Download the whole dataset as an excel spreadsheet here.

The Nigeria Security Tracker was edited by Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Studies Michelle Gavin.

More From Our Experts

More on:

Nigeria

Wars and Conflict

Conflict Prevention

Boko Haram

Violent Nonstate Actors

Creative Commons
Creative Commons: Some rights reserved.
Close
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License.
View License Detail
Close

Top Stories on CFR

Taiwan

Despite China’s growing pressure, Taiwan has developed one of the world’s strongest democracies—one that will be increasingly tested in the coming years. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Watermarking is often discussed as a solution to the problems posed by AI-generated content. However, watermarking is inadequate without other methods of detecting and sorting out AI-generated content.

RealEcon

Policymakers face complex cost-benefit considerations when intervening in the market to mitigate perceived risks, from climate change to competition with China.