Paper short abstract:

This paper postulates that crime and vigilantism are two diverging answers to the marginalization of youth in Lagos, Nigeria, and demonstrates that it involvement in vigilantes’ groups obeys to the same motivational dynamics at work in criminal activities. activities.

Paper long abstract:

Vigilantism and crime are assumed to be intimately tied by a causal-effect relationship, the first being usually presented as an answer (legitimate or not) to the second. In this paper I postulate two things: firstly, that crime and vigilantism are the two faces of the same medal in this sense that they are both rooted in the marginalization of the youth. Therefore, that secondly, given such a social, economic and political ostracism, vigilantism including mob justice and the crime it pretends to eradicate are two diverging answers to the same problem. They are the two modalities of action through which the most excluded young people of each neighborhood try to reconstitute themselves as full social actors and to influence community's affairs.The argument of this paper rests partly on a fieldwork observations and interviews with a ten of young denizens of the city I made during a one month journey in Lagos in January 2016 and on secondary data; specifically it reconsiders and comments vigilantes groups studies made in Nigeria during the two last decades and demonstrates that the involvement of the youth in such groups obeys to the same motivational dynamics at work in criminal activities, that is, the search for incomes, for social recognition, for mates and family members' respect and so on. A close analysis of the Area Boys a notorious group operating in the city of Lagos since the early 1980s even shows that some of these groups of young people often behave interchangeably as criminals and as vigilantes.