Violence in Nigeria

Introduction: Arguments for a qualitative and
quantitative analysis of violence in Nigeria
Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos
At first, some of the reports appeared frightening but, in the course of time, I got used to
alarms that no longer made any serious impact on me. It is debatable whether or not
familiarity with serious security reports, helps the President or any Chief Executive
in his administration.
Former Nigerian President Alhaji Shehu Shagari,
commenting on the daily bulletins of the National Security Organisation. 1
Nigeria has a reputation for being a very violent country. In 2014, it was considered
to be the seventeenth most fragile state in the world, and it was ranked 151
out of 162 countries in the Global Peace Index, a multidimensional report on violence,
security, and criminality. 2 This is a cause for alarm, and researchers obviously
have a role to play in the private and public debates on insecurity. However,
many academics claim that crime is on the rise without relying on any data
other than some scattered evidence. Most of the literature on violence in Nigeria
is qualitative. It rarely relies on quantitative data for a simple reason: police
crime statistics are not reliable, or not available, or not even published. Moreover,
the training of Nigerian social scientists often focuses on qualitative, cultural,
and political issues. The French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) has
been a pioneer in promoting research on urban violence in Nigeria, yet there is
still a need to bridge the qualitative and quantitative approaches of conflict studies.
This book fills a gap in this regard. First, it underlines the necessity of a trend
analysis to decipher the patterns and the complexity of violence in very different
fields: from oil production to cattle breeding, radical Islam to motor accidents,
land conflicts to witchcraft, and so on. Secondly, it argues for a complementary
approach using both qualitative and quantitative data. Statistics, as such, are inert,
of little use, and prone to manipulation; they require an empirical investigation
to make sense. 3 Thus, statistics cannot be accurate if they are not cross-
1
2
3
Shagari, Alhaji Shehu (2001), Shehu Shagari: Beckoned to Serve - An Autobiography, Ibadan,
Heinemann Educational Books, p. 327.
See: http://www.visionofhumanity.org/#/page/indexes/global-peace-index
See also: http://library.fundforpeace.org/library/cfsir1423-fragilestatesindex2014-06d.pdf.
Pérouse de Montclos, Marc-Antoine, Elizabeth Minor & Samrat Sinha, ed., Violence, statistics, and
the politics of accounting for the dead, Dordrecht, Springer, 2016.