The economic costs of justice failure: Inside the Nigerian study shortlisted for Elsevier’s 2025 Atlas Award

Elsevier has named a study on the relationship between institutional breakdown and extrajudicial enforcement in Nigeria a finalist for its 2025 Atlas Award. The award, dedicated this year to the global theme of Peace and Justice, recognises research with the potential to shape lives worldwide. Final selection is made by an external advisory board, which evaluates nominated articles, in Elsevier’s own words, on the basis of “the novelty of the research and its potential impact on society.”

The nominated paper, “Establishing the Nexus among Mob Justice, Human Rights Violations and the State: Evidence from Nigeria,” was published in Elsevier’s International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice in 2023. Co-authored by Sodiq Abiodun Oladipupo, a Nigerian economist now pursuing doctoral research at the University of Arkansas in the United States, with three colleagues based at Nigerian institutions, the paper applies an economic framework to a phenomenon more often studied within criminology and law.

From an economic perspective, the study characterises mob justice as a form of distorted collective action. It finds that distrust in the criminal justice system — often intensified by corruption, weak enforcement capacity, and structural inefficiencies — interacts with unemployment, inequality, and insecurity to push communities toward informal mechanisms of punishment. While such actions may appear to offer short-term deterrence, the research shows that they impose substantial long-term costs on economic development, institutional credibility, and social welfare. Mob justice, in the study’s framework, becomes a self-reinforcing pattern that benefits no one in the long run: individual attempts to maintain order collectively undermine legal certainty, institutional trust, and economic growth. The research also documents a systematic relationship between extrajudicial enforcement and human rights violations, including infringements on the rights to life, due process, and fair hearing. By situating these outcomes within an economic framework, the study presents rights erosion not as an isolated moral failure but as a predictable consequence of weak institutional performance.

The recognition arrives during a period of sustained national attention to mob violence in Nigeria. Amnesty International’s October 2024 report documented hundreds of incidents over the past decade and called for institutional reform, and recent high-profile killings have continued to draw public condemnation through 2025. Against that backdrop, the study’s central claim — that the persistence of mob justice tracks weaknesses in formal institutions rather than any inherent disposition toward violence — speaks directly to an ongoing Nigerian policy debate.

The Atlas Award draws each cycle from research across Elsevier’s portfolio of more than 2,500 journals. Final selection is made by an external Atlas Advisory Board — appointed by invitation and based at academic, scientific, and policy institutions outside Elsevier. Current members include Mohamed Atani, Head of the United Nations Environment Programme Office for West Africa, alongside other figures from international policy and academic bodies.

The study’s policy implications point toward institutional reform rather than purely punitive responses. The authors call for strengthening judicial efficiency, improving law enforcement accountability, reducing corruption, and addressing the socioeconomic conditions that erode public confidence in formal justice. The paper makes the case that durable reductions in extrajudicial violence will depend on changing the institutional incentives that produce it.