Insecurity Triad gains academic traction after being adopted by a leading communications scholar for new conflict research
There is a specific kind of validation that academia confers and another that the world confers. The academy signals acceptance through citation, peer review, and the slow machinery of scholarly publication.
Also read: Afenifere criticises Tinubu, links administration to rising insecurity and poverty
The world signals it differently — through use.
When a scholar picks up your framework not merely to interrogate it, but to build with it, something important has shifted. That is not endorsement. That is adoption.
That is what happened when Dr. Omoniyi Ibietan — Secretary General of the African Public Relations Association (APRA) and a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR)—reached for The Insecurity Triad to anchor the theoretical foundations of his paper on crisis communication in the Agatu conflict. He did not cite it as a curiosity.
More importantly for this discourse, Ibietan is a member of doctoral faculty at Rome Business School’s DBA programme.
He used it as a load-bearing wall.
His words, addressed to Premium Times editorial page editor Ololade Bamidele, are worth sitting with: the framework took him back to Mbembe, offered fresh insight into, and — and then did something rarer.
It shaped what he was about to write. “So compelling was it,” Ibietan noted, “that it shaped my theoretical framing for a new paper I just submitted.”
Ibietan’s message to Bamidele was in response to last week’s edition of The Sunday Stew entiteld: ‘The Insecurity Triad: Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Chinweizu — Nigeria’s Elite Class of Framework Builders’.
Dr Ibietan’s words: “Thank you Ololade Bamidele. Please tell Dr. Amuchie to keep it coming. The first part of this took me back to Mbembe (one of Africa’s leading representation of activistic scholarship).
Amuchie offered me a refreshing, lovely insight of the works of (Ali) Mazrui, (Claude) Ake, (Jean-François) Bayart, (William) Reno, especially his treatise on the ‘Relocation of Authority’ and of course Mbembe.
It was a meta-analytical enterprise. So, compelling was it that it shaped my theoretical framing for a new paper I just submitted on Crisis Communication in the Agatu Crisis. Needless to say this is also beautiful.”
This is not simply a compliment from a respected scholar. It is evidence of intellectual utility. Scholars are exposed to thousands of ideas during their careers.
Very few are incorporated into ongoing research. Fewer still alter the theoretical architecture of work already in development.
When an established academic changes the lens through which he interprets a conflict because of a framework he has encountered, that framework has crossed an important threshold. It has moved from proposition to application.
What makes Ibietan’s validation particularly significant is his position within African scholarly and professional networks. He occupies a rare intersection of communication studies, governance research, public policy, and professional practice.
His adoption therefore functions as more than an individual scholarly decision. It is an early signal that the Insecurity Triad possesses interdisciplinary reach.
A framework developed primarily to explain insecurity and conflict dynamics has proven capable of informing crisis communication research.
That is not a small achievement. It suggests conceptual elasticity without sacrificing analytical precision.
What makes this moment even more consequential is that the Insecurity Triad was never designed as a self-contained theoretical exercise.
It was built to travel. Its three pillars — Money, Land, and Mind — were deliberately constructed to be analytically portable across conflict environments, governance challenges, and security ecosystems.
Ibietan applied it to the Agatu crisis, a deeply localised conflict in Benue State with its own history of farmer-herder tensions, displacement, and contested narratives.
The framework held. It supplied categories capable of explaining not only the drivers of insecurity but also the communicative environment surrounding conflict.
That portability is often what separates enduring frameworks from temporary concepts. Many theories explain a single case.
The most influential frameworks explain multiple cases without losing explanatory power. They move across disciplines.
They generate new questions. They create intellectual bridges between fields that previously appeared unrelated.
The early evidence suggests that the Insecurity Triad possesses precisely these qualities.
There is also a broader significance to this moment. African intellectual production has long suffered from a structural asymmetry.
Frameworks generated in Europe and North America routinely become the default lenses through which African realities are interpreted, while concepts generated from African experience often struggle to achieve comparable visibility.
As a result, African scholars frequently find themselves applying imported theories to indigenous problems rather than exporting indigenous theories to the wider world.
The Insecurity Triad represents an attempt to reverse that flow. It is a framework theorised from Nigerian and Sahelian realities, derived from empirical observations of conflict, governance failures, criminal economies, and social fragmentation.
Its ambition is not merely to describe Africa but to contribute to the global vocabulary of security studies.
That is why Ibietan’s engagement matters. Validation from a scholar of his standing demonstrates that the framework is not circulating solely because of media visibility or public debate.
It is entering scholarly workflows. It is influencing research design. It is becoming part of the knowledge-production process itself.
His comparison to Mbembe is instructive. Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics did not become influential because people admired it. It became influential because scholars found it useful. It provided explanatory power where existing frameworks fell short. Researchers adopted it, tested it, extended it, and applied it across contexts far removed from its original formulation.
The Insecurity Triad is not Mbembe, nor should it be measured against the trajectory of a mature global theory.
But the comparison illuminates an important principle: intellectual influence begins when a framework starts solving analytical problems for other scholars. Ibietan’s adoption suggests that this process may already be underway.
The Agatu application is therefore more than a citation. It is proof of concept.
It demonstrates that the framework can survive contact with a different discipline, a different methodology, and a different research question. In academic terms, that is often the first indication that a concept has genuine staying power.
What the scholarly community should watch is not whether the Insecurity Triad receives more praise — praise is abundant and often fleeting — but whether it continues to be used.
Frameworks earn their place in the canon not through applause but through repeated deployment. They become influential when researchers begin treating them as tools rather than subjects.
Ibietan’s paper carries the architecture of the Triad into the literature on public relations, crisis communication, and conflict management.
Tomorrow another scholar may apply it to political economy, peacebuilding, migration, state legitimacy, or violent extremism.
Each application expands the framework’s reach. Each successful application increases its explanatory credibility.
That is how ideas compound. That is how indigenous theories become established traditions.
That is how a framework moves from being an author’s insight to becoming part of a field’s intellectual infrastructure.
The Insecurity Triad is now in motion. The significance of Ibietan’s validation lies not simply in who endorsed it, but in what he did with it. He built upon it.
He carried it into new terrain. He demonstrated that it travels.
The question is no longer whether the framework can move beyond its point of origin. It already has.
The question now is how far it will travel.
Unveiling the DSI in The Sunday Stew
As an undergraduate at the University of Calabar, one of the first sets of books to catch my attention was The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper’s landmark two-volume 1945 work of political philosophy. In it, he passionately defended liberal democracy and mounted a fierce critique of totalitarianism.
The other book of his I picked up was The Poverty of Historicism published in 1957, where he attacked the intellectual and logical validity of authoritarian teleology. While The Poverty of Historicism targeted the foundational logic, The Open Society dismantled the devastating political consequences of totalitarian rule.
However, long before he turned his sights on totalitarianism, the Austrian-British philosopher had already revolutionised western epistemology. In his groundbreaking 1934 book,
The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung), Popper introduced the concept of falsifiability as a solution to the demarcation problem—the question of how to distinguish between genuine science and non-science (such as pseudoscience, metaphysics, or myth).
At its core, the concept insists that for a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable.
This means there must be at least one logically possible observation, metric, or experiment that could prove the theory wrong. A theory that explains everything, explains nothing.
For three consecutive weeks in this column beginning on April 26, I laid bare the Trinity of State Decay (TSD)—a macro-diagnostic theory mapping how nations fracture into dual or competing sovereignties.
I analysed how this structural deterioration plays out in Nigeria and across the wider Sahelian context.
Yet, the theory is fundamentally scalable; it applies to all contexts and geographies where the devastating conditions of the Insecurity Triad take root, from the fault lines of Latin America to the fragile corridors of Southeast Asia.
But to save the Trinity of State Decay from the graveyard of mere political commentary or fluid narrative, it must meet Popper’s uncompromising standard. It must be measurable. It must be testable. It must expose itself to empirical refutation.
By anchoring the theoretical formulation to quantitative metrics, I provide international organisations and the global scholarly, policymaking and intelligence communities with a verifiable yardstick.
Also read: Insecurity: What do we make of fiddling, sleeping and snoring South-West leaders?
If the state’s legal authority and empirical reality remain tightly bound, the index will prove it; if they are violently drifting apart, the index will map the velocity of that separation.
