Resource conflicts and rural vulnerability: Artisanal gold mining, bandit economies, and community exploitation in northwest Nigeria

This study examines how artisanal gold mining intensifies resource conflicts and deepens rural vulnerability in northwest Nigeria by enabling the growth of bandit economies and systematic community exploitation. Drawing on weak-state theory and field interviews, focus group discussions, and secondary sources, the study analyzes how gold-rich territories have become contested spaces where miners, host communities, and armed bandit groups compete for control and access. The findings show that unregulated mining has created extractive corridors in which bandits impose protection rents, enforce forced labor, and deploy kidnapping and violence as tools of coercive governance. These practices have aggravated inter-ethnic tensions, disrupted farming and pastoral livelihoods, accelerated displacement, and weakened already fragile local governance structures. The study argues that banditry in the region is not merely criminal violence but a mining-centered political economy of coercion through which armed actors accumulate wealth and exercise territorial authority. By locating artisanal mining within the wider political economy of violence, the study demonstrates how mineral extraction reproduces insecurity, reinforces rural marginalization, and reshapes livelihood strategies in contexts of weak and fragmented state presence.