In spite of the growing recognition of the agency of youths in volatile societies, youths continue to be an under-utilized resource in conflict management. Thus, drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Nigeria, Adzande examines how youths are contributing to the management of farmer-herder conflicts. This study shows that youths are involved in informal policing as community vigilantes, as well as participating in mediation and the enforcement of restorative justice. A new initiative which is yet to be evaluated is the community-based security architecture in which youths can work with other actors to facilitate early warning, prevention, and resolution of conflicts between farmers and herders.

Food security in many developing countries has been threatened by several factors such as unequal land distribution, ineffective land reform policies, inefficient agricultural value chains, and an increasing number of climate disasters. In Nigeria, these threats are exacerbated by rapid population growth and extreme weather events, which have resulted in farmer-herder conflicts in most agrarian communities. This paper examines the differential impacts of the incidence and severity of farmer-herder resource use conflicts on food insecurity of rural households in Nigeria. We employ a two-stage predictor substitution model to estimate survey data collected from 401 rural households in Nigeria. The empirical results show that both the incidence and the severity of farmer-herder conflicts significantly increase food insecurity, and the severity of these conflicts has a larger impact than their incidence. The estimates of the conditional mixed process models confirm the robustness of our results. Additional analysis reveals that the incidence and severity of farmer-herder conflicts positively and significantly affect food insecurity, measured by the number of days with limited varieties of food eaten. Our findings highlight the importance of policy interventions that address ongoing farmer-herder conflicts in affected countries like Nigeria to enhance food security from a sustainable development perspective.

Despite periodic violent conflict between farmers and Fulani herders in many parts of Ghana, cooperative relations between them remain strong. They are “cultural neighbors” who cooperate both in times of violent conflict and during periods of no conflict. Cooperation between them is expressed through everyday interactions, cattle entrustment, resource sharing, trade, friendship, intermarriages, visitations, exchanges, communal labor, and social solidarity. Borrowing from theorizations of cultural neighborhood and everyday peace, this paper uses specific case studies from Northern and Southern Ghana to illustrate the enactment of cooperation between herders and farmers in areas of violent farmer-herder conflict.