Kinship, Land, and Conflict: The Historical Roots of Farmer-Herder Violence in the North Central Zone

This study empirically traces the historical roots of contemporary farmer-herder violence in Nigeria's North Central geopolitical zone, encompassing Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, and Kogi States, examining how the intersection of colonial land tenure disruptions, post-independence population growth, climate-driven environmental change, and identity politicisation has transformed historically managed seasonal resource competition into recurrent lethal violence. Farmer-herder conflicts in the North Central zone have claimed thousands of lives in the past decade and displaced over 500,000 persons, yet the depth of their historical roots and the multi-causal nature of their escalation are poorly understood in the policy literature. A mixed-methods historical-empirical design is employed, combining quantitative analysis of conflict incident data from the Nextier SPD Violent Conflict Database from 2015 to 2023 with archival reconstruction of colonial land use boundary decisions in Benue and Plateau Provinces, supplemented by 45 qualitative interviews with Tiv, Berom, and Fulani community leaders and conflict researchers. The Historical Ecology Framework and the Grievance and Opportunity Theory of Conflict provide the analytical lenses. Findings establish that colonial land use legislation including the Land and Native Rights Proclamation of 1910 and the Grazing Reserves Act of 1965 created the structural conditions for contemporary violence by removing the customary land governance mechanisms that previously managed inter-group resource competition. Keywords: farmer-herder conflict, historical roots, North Central Nigeria, land tenure, colonial legacy.