‘To Keep It Coming’: Reflections on framework building, idea formation and scholarly reception
There is a specific kind of validation that academia confers and another that the world confers.
There is a specific kind of validation that academia confers and another that the world confers. The academy signals acceptance through citation, peer review, and the slow machinery of scholarly publication. The world signals it differently — through use. When a scholar picks up your framework not merely to interrogate it, but to build with it, something important has shifted. That is not endorsement. That is adoption.
That is what happened when Dr. Omoniyi Ibietan — Secretary General of the African Public Relations Association (APRA) and a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR)—reached for The Insecurity Triad to anchor the theoretical foundations of his paper on crisis communication in the Agatu conflict. He did not cite it as a curiosity. More importantly for this discourse, Ibietan is a member of doctoral faculty at Rome Business School’s DBA programme.
He used it as a load-bearing wall. His words, addressed to Premium Times editorial page editor Ololade Bamidele, are worth sitting with: the framework took him back to Mbembe, offered fresh insight into, and — and then did something rarer. It shaped what he was about to write. “So compelling was it,” Ibietan noted, “that it shaped my theoretical framing for a new paper I just submitted.”
Ibietan’s message to Bamidele was in response to last week’s edition of The Sunday Stew entiteld: ‘The Insecurity Triad: Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Chinweizu — Nigeria’s Elite Class of Framework Builders’.
Dr Ibietan’s words: “Thank you Ololade Bamidele. Please tell Dr. Amuchie to keep it coming. The first part of this took me back to Mbembe (one of Africa’s leading representation of activistic scholarship). Amuchie offered me a refreshing, lovely insight of the works of (Ali) Mazrui, (Claude) Ake, (Jean-François) Bayart, (William) Reno, especially his treatise on the ‘Relocation of Authority’ and of course Mbembe. It was a meta-analytical enterprise. So, compelling was it that it shaped my theoretical framing for a new paper I just submitted on Crisis Communication in the Agatu Crisis. Needless to say this is also beautiful.”
This is not simply a compliment from a respected scholar. It is evidence of intellectual utility. Scholars are exposed to thousands of ideas during their careers. Very few are incorporated into ongoing research. Fewer still alter the theoretical architecture of work already in development. When an established academic changes the lens through which he interprets a conflict because of a framework he has encountered, that framework has crossed an important threshold. It has moved from proposition to application.
What makes Ibietan’s validation particularly significant is his position within African scholarly and professional networks. He occupies a rare intersection of communication studies, governance research, public policy, and professional practice. His adoption therefore functions as more than an individual scholarly decision. It is an early signal that the Insecurity Triad possesses interdisciplinary reach. A framework developed primarily to explain insecurity and conflict dynamics has proven capable of informing crisis communication research. That is not a small achievement. It suggests conceptual elasticity without sacrificing analytical precision.
What makes this moment even more consequential is that the Insecurity Triad was never designed as a self-contained theoretical exercise. It was built to travel. Its three pillars — Money, Land, and Mind — were deliberately constructed to be analytically portable across conflict environments, governance challenges, and security ecosystems. Ibietan applied it to the Agatu crisis, a deeply localised conflict in Benue State with its own history of farmer-herder tensions, displacement, and contested narratives. The framework held. It supplied categories capable of explaining not only the drivers of insecurity but also the communicative environment surrounding conflict.
That portability is often what separates enduring frameworks from temporary concepts. Many theories explain a single case. The most influential frameworks explain multiple cases without losing explanatory power. They move across disciplines. They generate new questions. They create intellectual bridges between fields that previously appeared unrelated. The early evidence suggests that the Insecurity Triad possesses precisely these qualities.
There is also a broader significance to this moment. African intellectual production has long suffered from a structural asymmetry. Frameworks generated in Europe and North America routinely become the default lenses through which African realities are interpreted, while concepts generated from African experience often struggle to achieve comparable visibility. As a result, African scholars frequently find themselves applying imported theories to indigenous problems rather than exporting indigenous theories to the wider world.
The Insecurity Triad represents an attempt to reverse that flow. It is a framework theorised from Nigerian and Sahelian realities, derived from empirical observations of conflict, governance failures, criminal economies, and social fragmentation. Its ambition is not merely to describe Africa but to contribute to the global vocabulary of security studies. That is why Ibietan’s engagement matters. Validation from a scholar of his standing demonstrates that the framework is not circulating solely because of media visibility or public debate. It is entering scholarly workflows. It is influencing research design. It is becoming part of the knowledge-production process itself.
His comparison to Mbembe is instructive. Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics did not become influential because people admired it. It became influential because scholars found it useful. It provided explanatory power where existing frameworks fell short. Researchers adopted it, tested it, extended it, and applied it across contexts far removed from its original formulation.
The Insecurity Triad is not Mbembe, nor should it be measured against the trajectory of a mature global theory. But the comparison illuminates an important principle: intellectual influence begins when a framework starts solving analytical problems for other scholars. Ibietan’s adoption suggests that this process may already be underway. The Agatu application is therefore more than a citation. It is proof of concept. It demonstrates that the framework can survive contact with a different discipline, a different methodology, and a different research question. In academic terms, that is often the first indication that a concept has genuine staying power.
