Violence, Identity Mobilization and the Reimagining of Biafra

The events leading to the Nigeria Civil War marked the triumph of force and violence over dialogue and negotiation as a means of conflict resolution. The success of the Nigerian state in imposing a military solution on the preceding political crisis, and then suppressing the ensuing Biafran rebellion, has had a lasting effect on state–society relations. As a result, the state has not refrained from using violence at the slightest provocation against competing and conflictingethno-religious groups. The tendency of the state to exercise domination through the deployment of violence implies an ongoing crisis of state hegemony rather than a resolution of civil unrest. This article argues that state violence was more important than ethnic divisions in triggering the secessionist attempt of Biafra, and has continued to create rather than resolve ethnic divisions across the country. The emergence in post-Civil War Nigeria of regimes that perpetrated or permitted mass violence against restive social groups remainscritical to understanding the contemporary rise of ethno-nationalist movements and waning allegiance to the Nigerian state, particularly among the Igbo. The aim of the article is to underscore the understated salience of state violence in the debates on identity and citizenship in multi-ethnic societies

Disempowerment from below: informal enterprise networks and the limits of political voice in Nigeria

Decentralized governance has enjoyed limited success in promoting popular livelihoods and political voice among informal actors. Explanations have tended to focus on sources of disempowerment from above, where informal collective action is overwhelmed or sidelined by more powerful government or private-sector interests. This article will focus on the ways in which prolonged crisis and informality can also generate processes of disempowerment from below by disrupting and warping informal organizational dynamics. In addition to the divergent interests of more powerful actors, informal associational initiatives have to contend with disruptive effects of poverty, intense competition and social and legal marginalization which constrain popular organization from within. Through a micro-politics of organizational networks in three informal enterprise associations in Nigeria, this article explores the ways in which prolonged economic and social stress combines with political marginalization to turn even economically dynamic and highly organized informal activities from a terrain of collective agency to an uneven playing field of volatile strategies, social fragmentation and pervasive exclusion. A realistic assessment of the obstacles to informal collective action is used to explore more effective forms of informal mobilization and political engagement in the context of African informal economies