Precarity as infrastructure: displacement, everyday governance and the ordinary politics of waiting in Benue State, Nigeria

Abstract This article explores how internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Benue State, Nigeria, reconfigure everyday life under conditions of governance deficits, insecurity and institutional neglect. Drawing on ethnographic research in Naka, Daudu II and Abagana camps, I examine how displaced populations mobilize social networks, religious ties, informal economies and everyday improvisations as infrastructural responses to life in displacement. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of people as infrastructure and camps as urban political space, I situate IDP camps not as peripheral sites of humanitarian crisis but as laboratories of African urbanism. By foregrounding the ordinary – cooking, parenting, trading, negotiating aid – the article shows how IDPs enact governance from below, transforming camps into dynamic sites of infrastructural negotiation, resilience and survival. The study contributes to scholarship on urban governance and displacement by reframing camps as enduring socio-political spaces where infrastructure, power and agency are constantly reassembled.