‘We Aren't Killing Each Other, but We Bear Grudges that Could Be Sparked’: How Interreligious ‘Peace’ and Non-peace Coexist in a West African City

Abstract

ABSTRACT An impact of the continual occurrence of Christian–Muslim conflicts in northern Nigeria is the direction of both academic and peace-building attention to the zones of conflict in the region, partly because it is assumed that it is the conflict or post-conflict areas that are deeply divided and should be dealt with. But the reality is that even the religiously mixed parts of the region where there has been no case of interreligious violence for years have only a fragile peace. In this article, I highlight an idea that has been around in Peace Studies: that the absence of intergroup violence does not necessarily mean the presence of peace between groups, and that, even in religiously mixed settings where interreligious violence has been absent for years, there could be serious interreligious and intrareligious divisions, hatred, suspicion and other threats to the existing partial peace. This was the case in Abuja, where I conducted fieldwork from January to August 2019. I contend that this has important implications for our visualization and mapping of (non)peaceful settings, our theory and practice of peace-building in northern Nigeria and other religiously mixed societies, and our study of Christian–Muslim or interreligious relations.