The Determinants of Nigeria’s Alliance Choices: A Quantitative Analysis of Bilateral Security Agreements

This study employs quantitative analysis to examine the determinants of Nigeria's bilateral security agreement formation, investigating the relative weight of material interests, normative factors, and historical ties in explaining why Nigeria enters into formal security partnerships with specific states. Alliance formation has been extensively theorised in Western contexts, but the alliance behaviour of African middle powers remains underexplored empirically. Drawing on alliance formation theory, the balance of threat model, and constructivist norm frameworks, this research constructs an original dataset of Nigeria's bilateral security agreements signed between 2000 and 2024, coding each agreement for key attributes including troop cooperation, intelligence sharing, arms transfer provisions, and institutional formality. Statistical analysis using logistic regression and event history methods examines which partner-country characteristics, including GDP, geographic proximity, shared threat perceptions, and trade volumes, predict the likelihood of security agreement formation with Nigeria. The study draws on data from the SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, UN Comtrade, the Correlates of War Project, and the Nigerian Ministry of Defence. Findings are expected to show that proximity to Nigeria's conflict zones and trade interdependence are stronger predictors than normative affinity, though historical colonial-era ties with the United Kingdom retain explanatory power. The research contributes to the empirical alliance behaviour literature on African middle powers. Keywords: alliance formation, Nigeria, security agreements, quantitative analysis, middle power.