Halting Herders-Farmers’ Conflicts in Nigeria through Enhanced Intergroup Relations and Community Policing

摘要

The conflict between herders and farmers in some parts of Nigeria has raised concerns about the fragility of the Nigerian Federation and the process of building peace in rural grazing communities where such conflict had deepened hostility, claimed thousands of lives, destroyed farmlands, physically incapacitated victims and displaced hundreds of others from their ancestral homes. This study interrogates intergroup relations’ influence on peacebuilding in herder-farmers communities in Nigeria using a cross-sectional survey of 1711 farmers and herders selected in 12 states across the six geopolitical zones. The study was anchored on Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisation and Symbolic Interactionism, which linked cultural conflicts to the clash of civilisations and intergroup relations. The data generated were analysed using chi-square and Ordinary Least Square. The study found that the nature of ethnic relations (P=0.000), frequency of interethnic marriage (P=0.000) and nature of cohabitation (P=0.000) of herders and farmers predicted peacebuilding in herder-farmers communities. The study also found that the use of community policing (P=0.000), neighbourhood watch (P=0.000), and cooperative identification of dark spots by community members (P=0.003) predicted the likelihood of de-escalating herder-farmers conflict and building peace in the rural grazing areas. While neighbourhood watch and identification of dark spots showed positive association, the application of community policing and the deployment of youths have the likelihood of igniting the peace process, implying that community policing integration into the peace operations and peacebuilding in the rural grazing areas of Nigeria must be done with a lot of caution.