Grammar of Geopolitics: Geopolitical Imaginations of Farmer-herder Conflicts in Nigeria

Abstract

The farmer-herder conflicts (FHCs) in Nigeria have aggravated in recent years, and so too has its scholarly inquiry. However, there is yet a critical geopolitics analysis of the conflicts despite their geopolitical manifestations. This paper explores the geopolitical imagination of the conflicts based on the “ Grammar of Geopolitics approach” of Gearóid Tuathail. Data used were newspapers’ stories and supplemented by government and independent bodies’ reports. The article shows that the conflicts are represented with ecological and socio-political storylines with local, regional, and global inclinations. They are imagined as evolving from local disagreements to entangle regional political crises and shaped by global environmental shocks (especially climate change) on local communities. The geopolitical storyline of the Nigerian government portrays the conflict as entrenched in lands and amplified by regional crises. The administration’s proposed socio-spatial arrangement (cattle colony) to segregate nomadic herders from arable farmers to avert violence has failed to gain traction in Nigeria’s various areas. The policy itself contradicts the ancient system of nomadic pastoralists, who flourish in smooth space and would not thrive in a constrained striated space. Thus, apart from addressing the environmental and ecological problems associated with the conflicts, the issue of regional geopolitical dynamics within Nigeria and the West Africa region has to be considered. Removal of regional barriers to access and inclusion of the pastoralists in resource use via a trans-regional framework recognizing local needs and disparities is vital. The paper indicates that the grammar of the geopolitics model can handle the media discourse of the FHCs in Nigeria well and helps to organize the narratives (if corroborated with extant scholarly literature as in the case of climate change-FHCs nexus) in such a way that avoids falling into inherently subjective trappings of the media storylines. Thus, the model is best suited for its purpose–to analyze geopolitical imaginations emanating from media sources.