Presentation short abstract

Using Nigeria’s FHC, the paper shows how ES and PE overlook the shifting processes that drive violence. A Processual Political Ecology approach traces how climate pressures interact with institutional choices and power struggles, revealing politics rather than scarcity as the key accelerator.

Presentation long abstract

This paper uses the Nigerian farmer–herder conflict (FHC) to reflect on the possibilities and limits of meaningful dialogue between political ecology and mainstream climate security thinking. FHC scholarship is trapped between Environmental Security (ES)'s Malthusian scarcity model and traditional Political Ecology (PE), which is faulted for neglecting the "right sort of politics" (Moritz, 2006). Established frameworks thus fail to capture the fluidity and temporal mutation of FHC, leaving the "intervening triggers" unresolved. This paper resolves this theoretical deadlock by proposing an integrated Processual Political Ecology framework. This approach traces how conflicts unfold through specific sequences of events and institutional choices, demonstrating that climate-induced transhumance is amplified and shaped by institutional politics. Holistic tracing of events, actions, and actors reveals that conflict escalation is driven by institutional politics rather than by resource scarcity.

The FHC provides a critical empirical test for engaging the Mainstream Security Studies (MSS) mandate. Findings reveal that engagement is fundamentally contested: policy elites readily incorporate the ecological critique but consistently resist evidence on the processual politics that serve as the conflict's actual accelerants.

The central ethical imperative for Political Ecology is to seize this moment and define its terms. By uncompromisingly foregrounding processual politics, this study insists on a framework that demands fundamental governance reforms, preventing the MSS apparatus from simply greenwashing structural problems and legitimising continued militarised responses in the "expanding theatre of violence.