Epidemiological methods provide target metrics and control parameters for multi-actor violent conflicts

Violent conflicts increasingly involve multiple armed actors competing for influence over shared civilian populations, creating complex dynamics that challenge conventional security analysis and policy design. We present a framework that adapts epidemiological methods to model multi-actor violent conflict as an epidemic process, informed by the conflict landscape in Nigeria. We derive a basic insecurity reproduction number ( R ₀ ), identify violence-free and persistent-violence equilibria, and introduce a novel Civilian Harm Index (CHI) to quantify humanitarian impact. Sensitivity analyses identify recruitment, ideological support from civilian populations, and abduction as the key drivers of conflict persistence and civilian harm. The framework reveals several counterintuitive findings. Interventions that most effectively suppress violence transmission are not necessarily those that minimise civilian harm, demonstrating that epidemic control and humanitarian protection may require distinct optimisation criteria. Likewise, interventions effective against one armed actor may be ineffective, or even counterproductive, when applied uniformly across groups. In addition, prisoner exchange and ransoming increase the persistence of violence and civilian harm. Although developed as an illustrative rather than predictive framework, our results show that epidemiological methods can provide quantitative metrics for evaluating intervention priorities and trade-offs in complex multi-actor conflicts.