Farmer-Herder Conflicts as a Clash of Ontologies in North-Central Nigeria

Abstract

Farmer-herder conflicts have become endemic in Nigeria, particularly its north-central region, since 2017. While various disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and even the sciences have given this problem attention, this paper is an attempt to philosophically
understand the issues involved in the crisis. Given the role of the cattle and the farmland to the material survival of the herder and the farmer respectively, discourses on these clashes have been dominated by the perception that they are struggles for material survival couched in religious terms. That is, these clashes have been largely interpreted in materialist terms. However, the distinct philosophical argument thipaper makes is that, the clashes are not just motivated by the inevitability of material survival. Using the social
ontological method of conceptual analysis based on the appeal to what can be coherently conceived, the article shows that: (i) the ontology of the Muslim Fulani herder is fundamentally different from that of the rural farmers in North-Central Nigeria (ii) a major area where this clash of ontology operates is in the centrality of land among the communities of North-Central Nigeria; and
(iii) the clash is further exacerbated by the fact that both ontologies are seemingly incommensurable. In line with these points, the key finding of the study is that, the farmer-herder conflicts in North-Central Nigeria can also be fundamentally described as a clash of
ontologies (worldviews)