February Café-Science IFRA-Nigeria and Alliance Française Ibadan: 10 myths about violence in Nigeria

Location: Alliance Française Ibadan, 7th Day Adventist Road, close to Magistrate Court, Iyaganku

Date: Thursday 13^th of February - 5 to 7pm

IFRA-Nigeria, together with the Alliance Française Ibadan, organised their first Café Science of 2020. The event themed on “10 myths about violence in Nigeria” was facilitated by Prof. Marc Antoine Pérouse de Montclos (IRD) and Abiola Victoria Ayodokun (Nigeria Watch). The debate was held at the Alliance Française of Ibadan, on Thursday 13^th of February from 5pm to 7pm. The event gathered about 50 people, friends and colleagues of University of Ibadan and from the Alliance Française of Ibadan.

**What are the Café-Science events?**

Café-Science are bimonthly events co-organised between IFRA-Nigeria and the Alliance Française of Ibadan. Researchers affiliated to IFRA and working on specific project in/on Nigeria will come introduce to general audience their research. The events are open to all to discuss about a specific topic on Ibadan, or Nigeria at large. The sessions aim at opening debates between researchers and the audience.

February 2020 theme: 10 Myths about violence in Nigeria

Nigeria has a reputation for being one of the most violent countries in Africa and in the world. It is sometimes compared to Mexico and Colombia when it comes to drug cartels, Iraq when it comes to oil conflicts in the Niger Delta, or Afghanistan, Syria, and Mali when it comes to jihadist insurgencies like Boko Haram in Borno. Such views are widely shared in Nigeria and abroad. Yet they often rely on personal perceptions and, sometimes, rumours about conspiracies, the power of invisible forces, or the scramble for resources. Hence it is necessary to debunk some of the local and global myths about violence in Nigeria.

About the stakeholders

Prof. Marc Antoine Pérouse de Montclos is a political scientist with the Institute of Research for Development (IRD) in Paris. He is a specialist on armed conflicts in Africa South of the Sahara and Nigeria in partcular. He is also the scientific director of the Nigeria Watch Project. He was joined by his colleague Mrs Abiola Victoria Ayodokun, the Information retrieval specialist from the Nigeria Watch project.

The discussion was based on the production of a leaflet, which is result of a collective effort, carried out during a Masterclass organized by IFRA-Nigeria (French Institute for Research in Africa) in 2017. Using the database constituted by the Nigeria Watch project, recording fatal incidents on a daily basis since 2006, this brief was the first attempt to obtain an objective assessment of the situation from a scientific point of view. It compensates for the lack of police statistics and provides answers to policy-makers, academics, journalists, diplomats, development agencies, humanitarian workers, and security operatives.