Theorising Resilience and Social Work Practice in Conflict-Affected Communities of North East Nigeria: Beyond Deficit Models

Resilience theory offers transformative potential for social work practice in conflict-affected communities by shifting the analytical lens from deficit to strength, yet its application in Nigerian conflict social work remains theoretically underdeveloped and empirically limited. This doctoral study theorises resilience and social work practice in conflict-affected communities of North East Nigeria, generating original theoretical and empirical contributions from Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe States. A critical constructivist paradigm employing transformative mixed methods underpins the study, combining a longitudinal cohort survey of 200 conflict survivors across three waves of data collection, 40 life history interviews, and participatory community mapping exercises. Latent trajectory analysis, resilience pathway modelling, and narrative analysis are applied. The study's original theoretical contribution is the Communal Resilience Social Work Model, which distinguishes individual, relational, and communal dimensions of resilience and articulates social work practice roles appropriate to each dimension in conflict settings. The model challenges dominant psychologistic resilience frameworks that locate resilience in individual traits and argues for community-centred social work practice that strengthens collective resilience capacities. An original empirical contribution includes the first longitudinal resilience trajectory study in a Nigerian conflict social work context. Keywords: resilience, conflict-affected communities, social work, North East Nigeria, communal resilience model