Some were motivated by the need for self-defense, others by sentiments of ethnic solidarity, and still others, including non-Fulani, by simple economic opportunism. As a result, between 20, an increasing number of herders found themselves joining criminal gangs or forming pastoralist militias. Environmental degradation and population growth have helped fuel a sense of resource scarcity, though residents and community leaders mostly identify government corruption in apportioning land titles and settling of disputes as factors that pushed both farmers and herders to begin arming themselves. Though the divisions are often blurry in practice, farmers belong largely to the Hausa community and herders to the Fulani. Land-use conflict in northwest Nigeria has increased dramatically in recent decades, driving a wedge between Hausa and Fulani communities. Since then, however, the presence of armed gangs has grown dramatically as a result of increased tensions between farmers and herders and the proliferation of small arms and light weapons throughout West Africa, exacerbated by Libya’s collapse in 2011. But as recently as fifteen years ago, crime remained a generally non-lethal problem in the region and bandits were few in number. As a rural region and hub of trans-Saharan trade, what is today northwestern Nigeria has experienced cattle rustling and highway robbery since pre-colonial times. Today’s banditry crisis is the culmination of years of deteriorating political, economic, and security conditions in northern Nigeria. A more effective campaign to defeat banditry requires a better understanding of the factors that drive it. Yet this campaign risks inadvertently strengthening the bandits and giving them a newfound unity. The Nigerian government is currently engaged in a renewed crackdown on banditry, deploying soldiers, cutting off cellphone networks and promoting anti-bandit vigilantes. Many Nigerians, even those directly affected by the conflict, do not have a clear idea of who the “bandits” are and what they hope to achieve. The banditry crisis contains elements of criminality, interethnic conflict, terrorism, and warlordism, and, what’s more, the salience of these various dimensions changes over time and between individual actors. Indeed, the term “bandits” is itself one that may sound romantic or quaint to many Westerners, obscuring the intense nature of the conflict. Part of the challenge is that the militancy in northwest Nigeria does not fit neatly within any of the paradigms through which Western observers generally frame African conflicts. But the conflict in the northwest should not be ignored simply because it doesn’t fit within the still-potent “Global War on Terror” paradigm and because its participants are not broadcasting their propaganda on global jihadi channels. The conflict in the northeast is driving an acute humanitarian crisis, tying up a significant chunk of Nigeria’s security resources, and adding to fears of a regional metastasization of Salafi-jihadism. Yet when it comes to insecurity in Nigeria (of which there is no shortage) the overwhelming priority for Western policymakers is northeastern Nigeria, site of the Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province insurgencies. The bandits number in the low 10,000s, making them more numerous than the country’s jihadists, and they have developed surprising fighting capacity, shooting down military jets and breaching the Nigerian Defence Academy. The Nigerian state is all but absent from large swathes of the northwest, with even the federal highways unsafe for government officials and their armed escorts. Since the mid-2010s, fighting has killed at least 12,000 (the true toll is likely much higher), displaced over a million people, and led to the shuttering of hundreds of schools and colleges across the region. Northwestern Nigeria is suffering from an intense, destabilizing conflict that has flown under the radar of international policymakers and analysts.
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