among the constituent groups than are required to effectively mitigate or contain the centrifugal forces that tear the society apart.
Thus, disintegration, secession, civil strife, civil war, minority agitation, and violent conflicts, all of which would normally be considered aberrant to ‘normal’ state formation, are quite common threats or actual occurrences in divided states. It is not surprising therefore that divided states have devised some of the most innovative and delicate systems of government. Most states practice some variant of the federal solution, with the emphasis on political accommodation and inter-segmental balance. This emphasis has made it necessary and expedient to adopt instrumentalities that mitigate the effects of majoritarianism, as well as promote inclusion, equity, and distributive justice between the different salient groups. Yet, and despite the precautions taken, divided states remain perennially unstable and many survive on the brink of collapse and disintegration.
By virtue of its complex web of politically salient identities and history of chronic and seemingly intractable conflicts and instability, Nigeria can be rightly described as one of the most deeply divided states in Africa. From its inception as a colonial state, Nigeria has faced a perennial crisis of territorial or state legitimacy, which has often challenged its efforts at national cohesion, democratization, stability and economic transformation. The high point of the crisis seems to have been the civil war in the late 1960s, which ensued shortly after independence in 1960. However, rather than abate, conflicts have become more or less pervasive and intense in the post-civil war period, and disintegration continues to be contemplated by aggrieved segments of society as one of the possible ways of resolving the ’National Question’. This means that the consequences of Nigeria’s diversity in an unstable political context remain as dire as ever. But, contrary to what some overly simplistic analyses of the implications of diversity in Nigeria and other countries suggest, diversity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for conflict. In other words, the very fact that a country has different ethnic, communal, religious, and racial groups does not make division and conflicts inevitable. And for that matter, empirical evidence shows that division and conflict are not dependent on the degree of diversity, as some of the most diverse countries (for example, Switzerland, Belgium, Malaysia and Tanzania) enjoy relative peace and stability, while some of the least diverse are the most unstable or violent (for example, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi and, perhaps, Sri Lanka).
Thus, experts have claimed that “a greater degree of ethnic or religious diversity… by itself” is not “a major and direct cause” of violent civil conflict. Rather, they see violent civil conflict as associated with “conditions that favour insurgency,” including “poverty, which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states”. Other factors that have been identified to intervene between diversity and conflict include the role of formal and informal institutions for conflict regulation, the different sizes of groups relative to the national arena, and the extent to which different identities (ethnic, regional, religious, class, etc) overlap with, or crosscut, each other.
The implication of all this is that there is a set of intervening variables between diversity and conflicts that needs to be interrogated: to unravel the nature of the connection between them and, in particular, to discern the linkages between how identities get mobilized and politicized and how this relates to the level of conflict. The dynamic character of identity formation, mobilization processes, and of the shift from identity-diversity to conflict suggests that interrogation must necessity be contextual and historical, if we are to capture the ebbs, flows, nuances and changes that are involved. These are the parameters that will guide our analysis of identities and conflicts in Nigeria in the following sections of this paper. The key questions around which the analysis is organized are: what are the major identities of political salience and how are they related? How and why have they become politically salient? What is the nature of conflicts that have ensued from identity and citizenship contestation, and how have they been managed or mismanaged?
