Broken Communities: Structural Violence, Dispossession, and the Reign of Terror in Northwestern Nigeria

Abstract Why do some pastoralists join bandit groups in Nigeria? This conundrum is yet to be explored in the emerging scholarly literature on pastoral banditry in Nigeria's troubled northwest region. Whereas the upsurge in pastoralist‐related banditry has been predominantly explicated with the theoretical frameworks of ungoverned spaces and relative deprivation, the role of structural violence in some pastoralists' decision to become bandits has not received sufficient scholarly attention. Drawing on the analytical framework of structural violence first advanced by the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, I contend that some pastoralists take to the composite crime of banditry as a consequence of the inegalitarian distribution of resources and power. Pastoralists resorting to banditry in the northwest region can therefore be considered as a rebellious response, albeit misguided, to the structural violence of everyday life―precisely, poverty and repression―in the Nigerian state that precludes them from meeting their basic human needs. To reverse the mayhem and to heal the broken communities in the banditry‐affected northern states in Nigeria, I argue that federal and state governments should not solely rely on a killing approach fixated on military warfare―or the surveillance of forests and remote areas―but must address the structural factors that nurture alienation amongst some pastoralists.