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Paper short abstract

Communities in Plateau and Southern Kaduna are quietly sustaining peace despite violence and uncertainty. This paper examines how local actors use everyday agency to mediate conflict, adapt livelihoods, and negotiate development pathways in Nigeria’s Middle Belt.

Paper long abstract

Nigeria’s Middle Belt has long experienced complex patterns of communal violence, yet communities in Plateau and Southern Kaduna continue to demonstrate strong forms of local agency that sustain everyday peace and development. This paper explores how local actors shape their futures amid insecurity, climate pressures, and limited state capacity.

Drawing on qualitative insights from peace committees, traditional institutions, youth groups, women’s networks, and faith-based mediators, the paper examines how communities build and maintain local infrastructures of peace. These include inter-group dialogue platforms, informal early-warning systems, collective livelihood adaptation, and community-driven mechanisms for managing land, identity, and mobility pressures.

The analysis draws on adaptive peacebuilding and everyday peace perspectives to understand how these practices emerge, evolve, and interact with wider political and institutional dynamics. The paper also interrogates how local agency is sometimes constrained or reshaped by elite interests, security actors, and donor interventions, especially where external support risks displacing community priorities.

By foregrounding practices from Plateau and Southern Kaduna, the paper provides grounded insights on what meaningful “local ownership” looks like in conflict-prone contexts. It concludes with reflections on how governments, donors, and national peace infrastructures can better enable community-led initiatives that advance sustainable peace and development in Nigeria’s Middle Belt.