13 - Communal Conflicts, State Responses, and Local Peace Infrastructure

Summary

Introduction

Nigeria's most serious and widespread security challenge is perhaps its least understood: communal violence … most often used to describe land disputes involving farmers and herdsmen or between rival ethnic communities.

(Campbell and Page 2018: 122)

I have a rather modest thesis. I believe that the nature and characteristics of contemporary conflict suggest the need for a set of concepts and approaches that go beyond traditional statist diplomacy. Building peace in today's conflicts calls for long-term commitment to establishing an infrastructure across the levels of society, an infrastructure that empowers the resources of reconciliation from within that society and maximises the contribution from outside.

(Lederach 2012: 9)

Since the inauguration of Nigeria's Fourth Republic on 29 May 1999, communal violence comes top as one of the factors necessitating Nigeria's description as a country that ‘has not exactly flourished but has not disintegrated’ (Obadare 2016: 2). The instability and insecurity arising from violent communal conflicts across the country has also informed its description as an entity ‘dancing on the brink’ (Campbell 2010). As of 2010, the official Nigerian government statistics indicated that 1.2 million people had been internally displaced owing to religious and ethnic conflict and that at least 13,500 deaths resulted from religious and ethnic conflicts (Campbell 2010). Out of a total of 677 incidents of mass atrocities in 2020, 207 came from clashes between farmers and herders (Global Rights 2020). In the first nine months of 2021, almost 8,000 people were directly killed in various conflicts (The Economist 2021). These are conservative estimates, especially because more people die indirectly from communal conflict than directly. Obviously, communal conflicts are high net contributors to insecurity and fragility because they are life-shortening occurrences. Fatalities that accompany communal conflicts in Nigeria offer additional understanding to the concept of deathscapes as spaces where everyday life has become prone to death because of violence and state neglect or structural violence (Agamben 2005). Although the African Union in 2013 adopted the ‘Master Roadmap of Practical Steps to Silence Guns’ by the year 2020 (Fabricius 2019), communal conflicts or non-state conflicts are still major causes of avoidable deaths as of 2020 (Palik, et al. 2020).