Violence in Nigeria’s 2019 general elections: trend and geospatial dimensions

Abstract

This article assesses the manifestations of violence in Nigeria’s 2019 general elections, focusing on trend and spatial dimensions. The article also engages three methodological concerns against most academic studies on electoral violence in Nigeria and beyond. First, research in this area are dominated by extensive narrative, which often reduces quantity of electoral violence in Nigeria to politicised (conflicting, speculative and unverifiable) aggregate data on fatalities. Second, the rising quantification of electoral violence in Nigeria are dominated by perception surveys with little efforts to reconcile them with actual records. Third, large-n studies on violence recorded around elections in Africa are proliferating with sophisticated quantification techniques, which hardly accommodate country-specific details. In contrast, this study observed 2177 incidents of conflict recorded in Nigeria during the period of the elections, and extracted 275 cases of electoral violence for analysis. These data allow us to re-examine the prevailing periodisation of electoral violence in the literature, which ignored violence during inter-election periods. This study also identifies the national distribution and subnational concentration of the violence. These are relevant to guide policy research, advocacies, decisions and security preparedness for peaceful election in Nigeria.