Economic Precarity and Violent Extremist Expansion in Africa's Littoral Frontier

Abstract Policy syntheses for West Africa expect jihadi groups to enter where economic hardship, cross-border corridor structure, and governance failure coincide. That expectation is a complementarity claim, and this paper tests it on a panel of 609 sub-national units across seven countries observed monthly from 2012 to 2025, with first entry by a jihadi actor as the outcome. Corridor exposure and proximity to recent violence carry the predictive load; economic precarity adds little on its own margin. The governance leg fails. Raising perceived governance failure in a poor, corridor-exposed unit lowers the predicted hazard rather than raising it, randomisation inference attributes most of that dampening to the precarity-corridor surface, and the one governance term with consistent inferential support is a negative interaction with the corridor. A forward typology trained on 2012 to 2018 data identifies the Benin departments that recorded first attacks after the training window closed.