Contribution to the Theory of Resilience Quantification and Enhancement for Electrical Infrastructure in Conflict-Affected Regions of North East Nigeria

This research develops an original theoretical framework for quantifying and enhancing the resilience of electrical power infrastructure in conflict-affected regions of North East Nigeria, making fundamental contributions to the emerging field of power system resilience engineering under the compound threat conditions created by armed conflict, natural hazards, and structural underdevelopment. North East Nigeria presents the most severe convergence of electrical infrastructure challenges in the country, combining the legacy of a decade of armed insurgency that has physically destroyed substations, overhead lines, and distribution equipment across Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa States, with the ongoing threats of post-conflict infrastructure sabotage, extreme weather events, and the acute social need for reliable electricity to support humanitarian operations, healthcare, education, and economic recovery. The theoretical contribution introduces a novel compound threat resilience metric that integrates the probability of concurrent threat scenarios, the time-varying vulnerability of infrastructure to each threat type as a function of reconstruction state, and the social value of electricity supply during recovery from compound crises, extending existing single-hazard resilience formulations in the literature. The framework incorporates a game-theoretic attacker-defender model adapted to the asymmetric conflict conditions of North East Nigeria to characterise strategic infrastructure threat scenarios. Resilience enhancement optimisation is formulated as a robust optimisation problem under deep uncertainty, yielding infrastructure protection and redundancy investment strategies that perform well across the full range of plausible threat scenarios. The framework is validated through engagement with TCN and Yobe DISCO infrastructure data. Keywords: resilience, electrical infrastructure, conflict-affected, North East Nigeria, robust optimisation.