Structural Violence and Social Reproduction: An Original Theoretical Analysis of Poverty Perpetuation in North Eastern Nigeria

The persistence of poverty in North East Nigeria across multiple generations cannot be adequately explained by either individual-level deficit theories or single-cause conflict narratives. This doctoral study develops an original theoretical synthesis of Johan Galtung's structural violence concept and Pierre Bourdieu's social reproduction theory to explain the multi-generational perpetuation of poverty in communities of Adamawa, Bauchi, and Borno States. Original ethnographic fieldwork spanning four years combined life history interviews with 72 participants across three generational cohorts, institutional field studies of schools, health facilities, and local governance structures, and discourse analysis of state poverty narratives. The synthesis framework, termed Structural Violence Reproduction, identifies how cumulative institutional violence operating through discriminatory resource allocation, educational quality deprivation, and gendered economic exclusion becomes internalised as habitus, reproducing poverty-generating dispositions across generations as if through individual choice. The framework makes three original theoretical contributions absent from existing poverty sociology: first, it theorises the role of conflict-induced institutional collapse in accelerating reproduction cycles; second, it identifies symbolic violence in state poverty programmes as a mechanism that naturalises poverty rather than addressing its structural causes; third, it proposes an original concept of generational poverty habitus as the subjective mechanism through which structural violence achieves reproductive effect. The empirical grounding in Northeast Nigeria provides the first integrated structural violence and social reproduction analysis for a conflict-affected West African regional context, advancing both theoretical domains. Keywords: structural violence, social reproduction, poverty perpetuation, North East Nigeria, Bourdieu.