Artificial Intelligence Applications for Enhancing Security and Threat Detection in Northeast Nigeria

The security landscape of Northeast Nigeria has, for over a decade and a half, been shaped by the protracted Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) insurgency, whose mass-casualty attacks, large-scale abductions and cross-border operations across the Lake Chad basin have produced one of the world's largest internally displaced populations. Conventional security architectures, reliant on manual intelligence gathering, static checkpoints and after-the-fact investigation, have struggled to keep pace with the speed, mobility and adaptive tactics of these threat actors. This paper presents a comprehensive review and conceptual framework for the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) — spanning machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and predictive geospatial analytics — to security and threat detection in Northeast Nigeria. The paper synthesizes evidence from the global and Nigeria-specific literature on AI-enabled surveillance, biometric identification, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) reconnaissance, social-media-based extremism monitoring, financial-crime detection, and predictive crime mapping, and proposes a layered architecture that integrates these techniques into a coherent threat-detection pipeline suited to a low-connectivity, resource-constrained operating environment. The discussion further examines the practical, infrastructural, and ethical constraints that condition AI adoption in the region — including unreliable electricity supply, data scarcity, algorithmic bias, and privacy risk — and closes with policy-oriented recommendations for security agencies, technology developers, and government institutions. The paper argues that AI should be understood not as a stand-alone solution but as a force multiplier that augments human intelligence and community policing, provided that deployment is grounded in transparency, local data governance, and human rights safeguards.