How do ACLED and Open Doors differ in methodology when counting religiously motivated killings in Nigeria?
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Executive summary
ACLED counts and classifies incidents of political violence using media, social media verification, rights groups and local partners, and records only those events specifically reported as religion-targeted — producing relatively conservative tallies of killings explicitly motivated by faith [1] [2]. Open Doors compiles faith‑specific casualty estimates for its World Watch List using questionnaires, local church networks and extrapolation rules that attribute deaths to faith-based motives and convert yearly totals into headline figures such as “deaths for faith-related reasons” [3] [4].
1. How ACLED constructs religious‑motivation counts
ACLED operates as an event‑level conflict monitor: it catalogs incidents of targeted political violence and annotates reported motivations where sources indicate religion as a factor, relying on traditional media, verifiable social posts, rights groups and local partners to corroborate each event [1]. Its published datasets and briefs emphasize that many killings in Nigeria occur in contexts — communal clashes, herder–farmer disputes, banditry, and insurgency — where victims’ religious identities are mixed or ambiguous, and that only a small proportion of civilian‑targeting events are explicitly reported as religion‑targeted [2] [5]. ACLED therefore separates overall civilian fatalities from the subset of incidents it codes as religiously motivated, producing counts that show religion‑targeted killings as a minority of total civilian deaths [1] [2].
2. How Open Doors builds its faith‑based death figures
Open Doors approaches the problem from a religious‑persecution advocacy perspective: its World Watch List research uses questionnaires filled by field teams and church partners, cross‑checks with external experts, and is audited by the International Institute for Religious Freedom, then applies scoring rules and extrapolations to produce country totals for believers “killed for their faith” and related indicators [3]. The organisation explicitly converts its annual total into headline metrics (for example, “14 Nigerian Christians are killed for their faith every day”) by dividing its assessed number of faith‑motivated deaths by 365, and it asserts that many attacks by jihadist groups and militants disproportionately impact Christians [3] [4].
3. Core methodological differences summed
The primary contrast is epistemological: ACLED prioritizes event‑level verification and conservative coding of motive (counting only events where sources report religion as a driving factor), whereas Open Doors prioritizes faith‑community reporting and inferential attribution (counting deaths it judges to be “for faith‑related reasons,” using partner reports and extrapolation rules) [1] [3]. Practically this yields very different outputs: ACLED reports hundreds of deaths in incidents labeled explicitly as targeting Christians over recent multi‑year slices and places many fatalities in broader conflict categories, while Open Doors produces larger aggregated totals of Christian deaths it attributes to faith persecution and uses them for advocacy rankings [1] [3] [4].
4. Strengths and limitations of each approach
ACLED’s strength lies in transparency around source types and event coding, helping researchers separate religiously labelled events from broader violence, but it may undercount faith‑motived intent when motives are complex or unreported [1] [5]. Open Doors’ strength is granular access to church networks and survivor testimony and an orientation toward harm experienced by believers, but its methodology uses extrapolation assumptions (including scoring rules and population inferences) that critics say can overattribute motive and produce advocacy‑friendly headline figures that may conflate economic, communal or criminal drivers with religious intent [3] [6].
5. Competing narratives, agendas and interpretive consequences
These methodological choices reflect different institutional agendas: ACLED markets itself to scholars and journalists as an independent conflict dataset emphasizing conservative coding and nuance [1] [2], while Open Doors is an advocacy NGO whose figures feed campaigns and the World Watch List, which influences policy debates and media narratives about persecution [3] [4]. Critics note that advocacy incentives can lead to extrapolation of faith‑motivation where evidence is thin, thereby inflating perceptions of a “Christian genocide,” a charge discussed by analysts and media sources juxtaposing ACLED’s lower religion‑targeted counts against Open Doors’ higher totals [6] [7] [8].
6. What this means for interpreting death counts in Nigeria
Readers should treat ACLED and Open Doors figures as answering different questions: ACLED reports what sources explicitly say about motive in logged violent events, producing a cautious lower bound on religion‑targeted killings; Open Doors reports what its networks and methodology infer about believers killed “for their faith,” producing advocacy‑oriented totals that may include deaths where motive is contested or multifactorial [1] [3]. Policymakers and journalists need both perspectives — rigorous event coding and survivor‑centred testimony — but must be transparent about each source’s definitions, assumptions and potential biases when citing headline numbers [2] [3].