Hobsbawm on rebellion in the postcolony: the political economy of armed conflicts in Northern Nigeria

Abstract

Nigeria’s northwest geopolitical zone is increasingly bedevilled by banditry perpetrated, in part, by aggrieved pastoralists. Pastoralist participation in banditry has been characteristically analysed using theoretical frameworks that portend their violent activities – kidnapping, cattle raiding and murder – as ordinary crimes deriving from ungoverned spaces and socioeconomic deprivation. While such theoretical outlooks shed light on the nature of armed violence in the northwest, they have failed to assess how pastoralist banditry constitutes not so much an ordinary crime but a social crime – a form of resistance against social inequality that stems from the longstanding marginalisation of pastoralism and pastoralists in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. Inspired by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s conception of social banditry, this article contends that pastoral banditry constitutes resistance to conjugated oppression axiomatic from the contradictions of the Nigerian political economy. Resolving the crisis of pastoral banditry in the region therefore requires attending to the marginality of pastoralists by curtailing abuses and providing public goods.