Land, Identity and Climate change: Understanding the peacebuilding efforts to address complex farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria.

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In the Middle-Belt region of Nigeria, there are regular violent clashes between farming communities, and herders. The herders are mostly from the dryer Northern part of the country, and they bring their cattle to the greener agrarian south in search of grass and water for their herds. The farmers mostly identify as Christian and are from different ethnic groups indigenous to the region, while the herders mostly identify as Muslim and are primarily from the Fulani ethnic group. Several explanations have been suggested as to why this conflict continues. Some focus on the impact of climate change and the desertification in the North, others on the struggle for scarce land resources, and others on the different identities of the groups in conflict. Instead of looking at these as individual reasons for the conflict, however, this research will explore how these factors converge. It seeks to provide a comprehensive explanation for why the farmer-herder conflict occurs and the reasons for its' persistence. International organisations, the Nigerian government, and local NGOs are all making efforts to promote peace in the region. This research will analyse these efforts and explore how the groups in conflict are experiencing the various peacebuilding interventions and policies at the different levels of intervention, the underlying reasons for why the interventions are being experienced as they are, why interventions in the region have been failing, and what policy makers and peacebuilders need to do differently. The project will produce both academic outputs and policy recommendations for peacebuilding actors.