CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1.1       Background to the Study

The nature of conflicts in the world has changed dramatically since the end of the

Cold War to the extent that conflicts between or among nation-states have reduced

significantly, while the trend is that conflicts have increased within nation-states due to

intense struggle for power and scarce resources between and among groups, thereby

putting ethnic group against ethnic group and communities against communities.

Consequently, Joshua (2014) observed that more than hundred (100) major conflicts

occurred in the world, leaving more than twenty million (20,000,000) dead, several

millions wounded and millions displaced persons.

In Africa, conflict on sub national level between communities or local militias is a

wide spread problem. In fact, the continent experienced 386 communal conflicts between

the period 1989 and 2014, with an estimate of 131, 563 people that lost their lives within

same period. The countries affected include Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya and Uganda,

withNigeria and Democratic Republic of Congo being the most affected, (Torbjornsson,

2016, Elfversson, 2013).

In Nigeria, this situation became more prevalent since the return to democratic

rule in 1999, threatening the survival of Nigerian democracy and unity. Within the first

three years of democratic rule in Nigeria, the country witnessed not less than forty violent

communal conflicts. From the violent protest of the Niger-Delta over the perceived

injustice for resource control and environmental degradation as well as quest for an

equitable federal arrangement, to the Itsekiri-Ijaw violence in the Delta over claims of

land ownership and boundary claims, the Ife-Modakeke communal conflict in Osun state,

the ZangonKataf in Kaduna state, Tiv-Jukun in Taraba State and Eleme- Okrika in Rivers

1

state. Nigeria has never been confronted with such great security challenge as it presently

experience evidenced by protracted communal clashes and killings and abduction by the

Boko Haram sect.

No region has been spared the vicious scourge of conflict though their prevalence

and intensity have not been the same in occurrences across the length and breadth of the

nation. Thus, fingers are swift in pointing accusingly to colonial legacies and continual

interplay of external and internal imperialist forces that fan the embers of violen