Contested Territorialities and Indigenous Land Rights in Cross River State’s Forest Frontier: A Critical Political Geography

The forest frontiers of Cross River State in Nigeria's South South geopolitical zone are sites of intense territorial contestation between indigenous forest-dependent communities, the Nigerian state's conservation apparatus, logging and plantation concessionaires, and international conservation organisations whose competing claims to forest territory generate complex geographies of dispossession, resistance, and negotiated access that have not been adequately theorised in Nigerian political geography. This study develops a critical political geography of contested forest territorialities and indigenous land rights in Cross River State, focusing on three contested frontier zones: the Mbe Mountains corridor, the Oban Hills periphery, and the Boki Community Forest area. The theoretical framework integrates critical political geography's territorial sovereignty concepts with indigeneity theory, political ecology of conservation, and African land governance scholarship to examine how overlapping territorial claims are produced, contested, and provisionally settled through legal, discursive, and material practices. The research methodology combines 24 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, legal document analysis of land tenure instruments and court records, oral history collection from 90 community elders, and participatory mapping of community-claimed territorial extents using GPS and sketch map techniques. Geospatial analysis quantifies the spatial extent of conflicting territorial claims and documents encroachment dynamics over the 2010 to 2023 period. Results demonstrate that conservation territorialisation by the Cross River National Park management has consistently privileged external scientific and bureaucratic knowledge forms over indigenous land knowledge, systematically displacing forest communities from territories essential to their cultural and material reproduction. The study develops an original Contested Territoriality Framework applicable to forest frontier settings across Sub-Saharan Africa. Keywords: contested territoriality, indigenous land rights, Cross River State, critical political geography, South South Nigeria.