Abstract Parts of northern Nigeria are becoming enclaves of banditry for gangs of cattle rustlers who maraud largely ungoverned forests. Extant studies of banditry shy away from serious interrogation of cattle rustling and ungoverned forest spaces in northern Nigeria. Onwuzuruigbo investigates the connection between cattle rustling and ungoverned forest spaces, highlighting the role of criminal groups in creating their own governance structures. The upswing in cattle rustling may thus be attributed to poor forest governance, which effectively keeps the government and its agents away from forests. Inclusive forest governance is one path toward addressing cattle rustling in northern Nigeria.

Over the years, the social sciences and related disciplines in postcolonial societies have agitated against the dominant Eurocentric mode of knowledge production. In this case, the grouse against Eurocentric knowledge production is that it undermines attempts at indigenising Eurocentric sociology in Nigeria. This article is an engagement with efforts to evolve a Nigerian sociology. It draws upon the concept of the captive mind, developed by Syed Hussein Alatas, a Southeast Asian intellectual, to critically explore the indigenisation of sociology in Nigeria. In doing so, the article explores the development and entrenchment of Eurocentric sociology as well as attempts at indigenising it over five decades of the production of sociological knowledge in Nigerian universities. It portrays the ways in which the ‘captive’ Nigerian sociologists, students of sociology and the antagonistic material conditions of producing and propagating knowledge connive against the indigenisation of sociology in Nigeria.

Intra-state conflicts in Africa have been attributed to various factors such as the end of the Cold War, globalization, sustained population growth, environmental scarcity and violent youth culture. Extracts from these dominant global perspectives, collocated and mixed with the economic crisis thesis at the national level, constitute the mainstream analytical scheme for understanding the proliferation of communal conflicts in Nigeria. However, the relevance of horizontal inequality in accounting for the multitude of communal conflicts in Nigeria has been glossed over by scholars. This article highlights local narratives of inequalities and how they provide impetus for communal conflicts in Aguleri and Umuleri communities of south-eastern Nigeria.

This paper interrogates the connection between colonial administrative policies, its urban planning strategies and contemporary conflicts in an African city. Urban design can shed light on the socio-political processes in the evolution of the city in Africa. Apart from the master-servant relationship that characterized Euro-African relationship in the built environment, colonial regularization, and rationalization of urban space foregrounded power relations between different African groups in the city. This promoted struggles for space between different African groups -indigenes and settlers. Relying on interviews, focus group discussions and archival sources, this article discusses the ways in which historical forces and colonialism, in this case, colonial administrative policies and urban planning ethos, promoted a certain spatial ordering and power relations among disparate racial, ethnic and religious groups and the grievances they invigorated underlie nascent ethno-religious conflicts in Jos. It does so because conventional explanations in the mushrooming literature on urban conflicts and violence in Nigeria have all too often presented the conflicts as though they are recent developments, inspired by the consequences of structural adjustment programme, resurgence of identity politics and the politics of local government creation.

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