Articulatory flow of Fulanisation discourse of the farmer-herder conflicts in the Benue Valley region, Nigeria

Abstract

In Nigeria, farmer-herder conflicts have been examined through environmental security and political ecology lenses. More recently, discourse approaches have emerged, but they largely need to incorporate ethnographic accounts. While studies have focused on different facets of religious conflicts in northern Nigeria, how the discourse surrounding Muslim-non-Muslim conflicts relates to the farmer-herder conflict in the region needs further scrutiny. Against this background, this paper examines how the Islamisation narrative surrounding a religious conflict (Wukari Religious Crisis) intersects with the discourse of farmer-herder conflicts leading to the emergence of Fulanisation discourse in the Benue Valley region of Nigeria. It analysed ethnographic data and documents to explore this emergence of Fulanisation discourse, through what I call articulatory flow from a critical geopolitical perspective. Through the concept of articulatory flow – the flow of articulations from one discursive field to another linked through desires – the paper shows how the Islamisation discourse of the Wukari Religious Crisis flowed into the articulations of the farmer-herder conflict, producing a Fulanisation discourse because of specific desires. This finding contributes to the ongoing discussions on using assemblage frameworks to rework post-structuralist theory by arguing that discourses have spatial agency via assemblages and can crisscross fields of discursivity.