WIREDGOV

Research across different geographies has increasingly reshaped how the relationship between militancy, criminality and legitimacy is understood, with important implications for conflict prevention and peace-making.

Sat in Abuja contemplating recent violence across northern Nigeria (from high rates of crime and kidnap-for-ransom to militancy in the North-East and a metastasising banditry problem in the North-West), an official conceded: ‘most of time it is confusing, . . . [stakeholders] lack the understanding to properly categorise these conflicts and identify [appropriate] interventions’. A resident in Yobe was blunter: ‘bandits, criminals or terrorists? It doesn’t really matter; they’re all the same people’.

Both were interviewed as part of RUSI’s recently concluded ‘OCTA’ programme, an investigation into grassroot perceptions and experiences of conflict spanning tracts of Nigeria and Mozambique, that captures the overlap and interplay between discrete modes of insecurity. Amid numerous examples of violence and vulnerability – extremism, gangsterism, state abuses and street thuggery – conflations in labels, language, tactics and membership repeatedly blurred organisational boundaries. The aesthetic and methodology of Boko Haram’s offshoots, for instance, seemed to converge with those of rural bandits, leading respondents to describe ‘creeping signs’ of ‘jihadisation’ – black flags, religious tropes and Islamist chants – among criminal outfits in Kaduna, Katsina and Zamfara. Terrorist, insurgent and gangland ‘brands’ – Islamic State West Africa (ISWAP), Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS), Lakurawa and Ecomog to name a few – were likewise adopted, shed or re-invented when convenient, leaving individual affiliations fairly flexible. In northern Mozambique, the picture appeared even more hazy, with illicit flows of arms, minerals, timber, ivory and narcotics persisting (to varying degrees) across territory held by Ansar al-Sunna but without evidence of direct complicity.

In many ways, OCTA demonstrates the difficulty of mapping the scope, scale and dispensation of such conflicts and their ‘shadow economies’; a partial symptom of research constraints (poor access, insufficient sampling, limited trust and security restrictions) and imperfect information among local stakeholders. That said, this confusion does yield other insights, with the fungibility and fluidity of armed groups and their sundry interactions with surrounding populations raising important implications for state and non-state governance. While different forms of violence clearly have their own drivers and dynamics, they co-exist within a shared social ecology, a wider system conducive to militant mobilisation. At the same time, these settings create transient distinctions between licit and illicit activity in the public imagination, while exposing the uncomfortable reality that stability and prosperity are not always synonymous. War can create new markets, commodity chains and informal industries that perpetuate violence while sustaining community coping mechanisms and survival strategies. Occasionally, criminal economies can even become pacifying in themselves, eliciting ‘developmental effects’ that many see as beneficial, if not preferable, to an absent or rapacious state.

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