Beyond Ungoverned Spaces: Connecting the Dots between Relative Deprivation, Banditry, and Violence in Nigeria

Abstract

The emergence of criminal groups—“armed bandits” in the local parlance—in the northwest geopolitical zone has compounded the security conundrums in Nigeria. The dominant explanation for the ongoing banditry draws on the “ungoverned spaces” theoretical framework to contend that the phenomenon is a byproduct of the state’s abject failure to monopolize violence over its territory. The failure on the part of the state to impose order on its territory leaves much room for loosely organized vicious armed groups to wreak havoc on local communities in the northwest region. The proponents of this perspective inevitably recommend a military solution to the security problem. In this article, I take a different position that counteracts the “ungoverned spaces” thesis. I argue that the “ungoverned spaces” thesis blatantly ignores the socioeconomic context within which banditry is embedded and how such context nurtures crime and deviance. Drawing on the relative deprivation theory, I contend that banditry owes not so much to “ungoverned spaces” but to the ethnic cum material grievances of some pastoralists who have taken to criminality for survival and who pinpoint discrepancies between what they had, what they have, and what they think they should have. I argue that resolving banditry would require attending to pastoralists’ grievances through apposite socioeconomic interventions.