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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Collective violence in Nigeria: patterns and significance
Author:Ayeni-Akeke, Afolabi
Year:1988
Periodical:Research Review
Volume:4
Issue:2
Pages:28-49
Language:English
Geographic term:Nigeria
Subject:organized crime
Abstract:Against a background of the multiplicity of overlapping social cleavages, the author illustrates the diversity of collective violence in Nigeria since the early 1950s. A certain underlying unity among the various types of social conflagration is detectable. They all fit into one of the following categories: religious violence by groups threatened by the spread of secularism, heresy and competition with another faith; violence by low-ranked rural peasant groups threatened by the spread of capitalism and urban elite exploitation; riots by communal or ethnopolitical groups competing for or advocating a redistribution of values and resources; and repressive State-directed violence by the political class threatened by articulate groups, such as students. Moreover, these forms of collective violence were all precipitated in order to preserve or restore certain sociopolitical relations and in this sense, they can all be classified as one or another form of vigilantism. Vigilantism has been one of the responses to modifications in socioeconomic structure and transformations in cultural values, and an associated unprecedented proliferation of new groups, engendered as a result of the Nigerian State's increasing penetration in all domains, incorporating the various cleavages into the mainstream of socioeconomic and political life. Bibliogr.
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