Spatiotemporal evolution of Nigeria’s armed conflicts and terrorism and the associated shift in social perceptions

Abstract

Abstract Nigeria is one of the largest countries in Africa that is most severely affected by armed conflict and terrorism. To help Nigeria design effective measures to curb armed conflicts and terrorism, it is essential to analyze all available data. We propose to first systematically characterize the spatiotemporal evolution of armed conflicts and terrorism in Nigeria using the events and fatalities data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) Project by constructing a few new and readily computable indexes, then utilizing another media big data, the Global Database of events, language, and Tone (GDELT), to construct two general indices, to describe the collective national activity about cooperation and conflicts and examine how social perception on conflicts and terrorism in Nigeria has been changing. We find that armed conflicts and terrorism in Nigeria have become more widespread spatially and more uniform temporally, characterized by appropriate changes in Shannon entropy. We have also found that economic decay, erosion in democracy, and increase in corruption are all highly correlated with the increase in armed conflicts and terrorism, and the general societal perception in Nigeria has been accepting the severe armed conflicts and terrorism after the COVID-19 pandemic as a new normal. Therefore, great care has to be taken to ensure better economic development in Nigeria, besides calling for greater support and enhanced international and regional cooperation.