Furthermore, progress in reducing IPV differs between Boko Haram affected areas and the rest of Nigeria. Controlling for differences in individual and household characteristics, we find that BH insurgency is associated with slower progress towards preventing and eliminating women’s experiences of physical and sexual IPV. This finding implies that conflict may not always increase the prevalence of IPV but may set back progress in lowering IPV that could otherwise have been achieved.

Our findings contribute to two literatures. First, we extend the literature that quantifies the association between conflict and rates of IPV using nationally representative data. In addition, we analyze the association between conflict and indicators of behavior change that are associated with IPV risk; controlling behavior of male partners and women’s ability to influence household decision-making. We find controlling behaviors of husbands/partners and reductions in women’s autonomy in household decision-making are heightened in locations that are impacted by the BH insurgency, indicating that the BH insurgency adversely affects women’s agency and exacerbates behaviors that are often pre-cursors to IPV. Second, in analyzing IPV we expand the research literature examining the effect of conflict on human development in Nigeria. UNDP (2018) points to the destruction of social and economic infrastructure in the conflict affected areas. Measures of well-being – including food security, gender equality, access to health, education, clean water and sanitation - captured in the various reports and community surveys conducted in the region have all worsened. Research to date has focused on health outcomes and access to maternal health services. Ekhator-Mobayode and Asfaw (2019) and Howell et al. (2018) find the BH insurgency reduced anthropometric measurements of children under five. And Chukwuma and EkhatorMobayode (2019) find that the BH insurgency decreased the probability of any antenatal care visits and decreased the probability of delivery at a health center by a skilled health professional.

We use a careful empirical strategy employing a quasi-experimental methodology to explore these conflict-related impacts. To estimate the effect of the BH insurgency on IPV we spatially link geo-referenced data on conflict events from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Database (ACLED) with survey data from two rounds of the Domestic Violence (DV) module of the Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) collected in the period before and during the BH insurgency, and apply a difference in difference approach.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides some background on the IPV prevalence in Nigeria and the Boko Haram insurgency. Section 3 discusses the conceptual framework. Section 4 presents the data and empirical model specification. Results are presented in section 5 and section 6 concludes.

# 2. Background: IPV prevalence in Nigeria and the Boko Haram insurgency

The most recent estimate of IPV in Nigeria, based on data from the 2013 NDHS, suggests that 16 percent of women have ever experienced physical or sexual IPV (NPC 2014), a rate considerably lower than lifetime prevalence of IPV among ever-partnered women for Africa -37% (World Health Organization, 2013). However, IPV rates vary considerably across regions, reaching 28 percent in the South-South region (Table 1). Analysis of the NDHS data finds that there are significant ethnic and geographical differences in the likelihood of experiencing IPV (Lino et al. 2013; <mark>Nwabunike and Tenkorang 2015</mark> ) and qualitative and smaller scale quantitative studies find 3