Beyond Violence: The Political Economy of Banditry and the Transformation of Rural Insecurity in Nigeria

Banditry in Nigeria, especially across the North-West and into some parts of the North-Central zone, is typically theorized as a security or criminal-justice issue-one best tackled through the deployment of military and law enforcement forces. This paper contends that while this line of theorizing is not necessarily wrong, it is only partly right: in the contemporary Nigerian context, banditry has itself become an evolving, rural political economy that both extracts and redistributes revenue through cattle rustling, ransom kidnapping, informal taxation of farming and mining communities, and domination of rural trade corridors-functions that increasingly map on to those of the criminal and rebel governance networks documented in other, longstanding African conflicts. Drawing on the political economy of conflict literature-including greed/grievance theory and war-economy analysis-and on evidence-based understanding of the nature of Nigerian kidnapping, banditry, and human security, this paper unpacks the process by which chance opportunism and cattle rustling gave way to a diversified criminal economy, reviews the structural and governance conditions (competition over land and resources, proliferation of small arms, elites’ absence and collusion) that enable the phenomenon, and analyzes what the inability to contain it through typical kinetic and negotiated approaches suggest about future responses. A new approach to the latter must recognize that success, so far, depends on mitigating the sources of revenue and governance voids while addressing land and resources conflicts.

Keywords: banditry, political economy of conflict, rural insecurity, Nigeria, criminal governance, cattle rustling, kidnapping-for-ransom.