The Geography of Fear: Corridor Diffusion and the Spatial Reconfiguration of Insecurity in North-Central and South-West Nigeria

The spatial logic of insecurity in Nigeria has undergone a subtle but consequential shift. While scholarly and policy attention remains fixed on the North-East insurgency and its symbolic school abductions, a different geography of risk has consolidated across the North-Central and South-West. This article documents and theorizes that shift using a dual dataset: 61 school-related threat events between January and May 2026, and 112 general security incidents for May 2026. Drawing on spatial diffusion theory, routine activity theory, and near-repeat victimization, we demonstrate that insecurity in Niger, Kogi, Kwara, Oyo, Osun, and Ekiti States is not random but exhibits corridor-like continuity structured by environmental accessibility, guardianship deficits, and temporal reinforcement. We introduce the Corridor Diffusion Security Framework (CDSF) to explain how discrete attacks—on schools, traditional rulers, commuters, and clerics—coalesce into a self-sustaining spatial system. Mean institutional response time to school incidents was 89 minutes, exceeding all international norms, while fewer than 1% of schools had formal protective deployment. The May 2026 data reveal that 73% of all incidents occurred within 15km of a federal highway or forest reserve, and 60% occurred within 21 days and 10km of a prior incident. We argue that school vulnerability cannot be analytically separated from broader corridor insecurity; both are produced by the same governance failures. The study reframes “attacks on education” from episodic violence to an outcome of spatially distributed guardianship failure. For Safe Schools Declaration implementation, this implies that fencing schools without securing corridors reproduces the very geography of fear it seeks to dismantle.

spatial diffusion, school abductions, guardianship

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