Security analysis, grounded in the data.
In-depth analysis of the forces shaping security in Nigeria, built on OpenWatch’s live record of every reported incident.
One Country, Many Wars: Nigeria's State Police Bill, Read Through the Data
Nigeria's lawmakers have approved a bill to break the federal police monopoly and let states run their own forces. Strip away the politics and the core argument is about geography, which is exactly what OpenWatch's incident record measures. Here is what the data says about the crisis the bill answers, and what state police would and would not fix.
Serving in the Crosshairs: NYSC Deployment and Nigeria's Geography of Risk
Each year the National Youth Service Corps sends tens of thousands of graduates across Nigeria, including into states where kidnapping, banditry and insurgency are routine. The deployment system has not caught up with the country's security map. Here is what the data shows, and what should change.
The Geography of Ransom: How Kidnapping Became Nigeria's Defining Crime
Kidnapping is now the single most common security incident OpenWatch records in Nigeria, ahead of terrorism and communal violence. It has grown from a Niger Delta tactic into a national industry with its own economics, supply chains and geography. Here is what the data shows about where it happens, who it targets, and why it keeps spreading.
Banditry's Heartland: How Nigeria's North-West Came Apart
In Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto and Kebbi, what began as cattle rustling has hardened into armed groups that tax villages, abduct at scale and now plant bombs on highways. This is not the North-East insurgency. It is something newer, and in places the state has stopped governing.
The Middle Belt's Long War: Land, Faith and the Killing Fields of Plateau and Benue
Plateau and Benue sit on Nigeria's most contested ground, where competition for land between farmers and herders has fused with ethnic and religious fault lines into a cycle of attack and reprisal. Communal violence is the deadliest threat type there, and the data shows it getting worse.
