Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the political economy of nomadic pastoralism and conflict in Nigeria. It argues that structural factors like demographic changes and environmental factors cannot fully explain the phenomenon of farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria. It establishes the implications of the Conflict.

Paper long abstract:

This paper critically examines the political economy of nomadic pastoralism and conflict in the pastoral corridors of Nigeria. Conflicts between pastoralists and farmers are not new phenomena, as they have existed since the beginnings of agriculture. However, the past decade has witnessed an upsurge in conflicts between these two groups. Consequently, considerable amount of research has been conducted since the 1990s on conflicts between farmers and pastoralists in Nigeria. Some of these studies have focused on population growth, farmland expansion, the quest for greener pastures by herdsmen, environmental stress and irrational resource management as causes of conflicts between farmers and herders in Nigeria. However, none of them have addressed the critical issue of how these conflicts, which are supposedly caused by population growth and environmental stress, articulate with other ethnic, political, religious conflicts. In this paper, I seek to fill the gap in the literature and policy discourses by focusing on this fundamental, but yet scarcely studied facet of the farmer-herder conflicts in Nigeria. By interrogating political, ethnic, religious and other dimensions of the conflict, this paper seeks to underscore the fact that the conflicts are rooted in history, ecology and political economy of Nigeria; hence, a single explanatory variable cannot be adduced as being responsible for analyzing and understanding the dynamics and dialectics of the farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria.