Publication

While focusing on the city of Jos, this article argues that 1) Nigeria’s statutory framework grants local officials the authority to extend or deny basic rights to citizens in their jurisdictions, thereby creating incentives for the politicization of ethnicity and escalating intercommunal violence; 2) ineffective state responses to repeated ethnic clashes have highlighted a lack of political will to address this violence; and 3) while currently concentrated in central Nigeria, the systemic drivers to identity conflict have the potential to spread elsewhere in the country and will require fundamental institutional reforms to resolve.