Scholarship
Research
As a Fulbright Fellow in Nigeria from January through December 2025, I conducted 209 interviews across northern and southern states. The resulting collection is the largest qualitative interview dataset on farmer–herder conflict in Nigeria. The data will be available in 2027 through the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where I am an affiliate. This work has informed, and continues to inform, peacebuilding strategies developed by local organizations.
Research Agenda
The Social Legibility of Conflict and Peace.
My dissertation asks how people identify the drivers of conflict, assess relationships while bargaining, and define peace. Interviews with conflict-affected communities in Nigeria form the basis for each paper.
Dissertation papers
01
Crosses and Crescents or Cattle and Crops: Identity, Information, and Everyday Explanations of Farmer-Herder Conflict in Southern Nigeria.
Abstract: This article examines how conflict-affected communities in Southern Nigeria explain the causes of farmer-herder violence. Academic and policy debates have frequently interpreted the conflict through broad explanatory frameworks, including ethnic division, religious persecution, climate change, and resource competition. These explanations often shape international responses to violence, yet it remains unclear whether they reflect how those who experience the conflict directly understand it. Drawing on 106 semi-structured interviews with conflict-affected community members, civil society actors, traditional leaders, and government officials across Edo, Enugu, and Oyo states, this study asks how local actors identify the drivers of violence and whether their explanations align with dominant scholarly and policy narratives. Respondents initially identify ethnic division as a cause for 35% and religious differences for 25% but later discount those explanations and shift toward a broader collective narrative of information asymmetry. Regular community members cannot verify with whom transactions over land were made or under whose authority; herders do not know whether information about the transaction was shared with communities; and traditional leaders face competition and distrust within their own ranks and do not know who has what information. The paper argues that explanations in farmer-herder conflict literature often start in academic and policy conversations, and that looking locally can shift our epistemology and help us better understand the conflict by examining how local actors identify the drivers of violence.
Keywords: Farmer herder conflict; information asymmetry; conflict drivers; causal attribution; local knowledge
02
Signals without Social Sight: Relational Information in Nigeria’s Farmer-Herder Conflicts.
Abstract: Why does repeated interaction sometimes fail to produce the information necessary to improve bargaining in conflict? The ongoing history between farmers and herders has provided many opportunities for the groups to gather information about one another, allowing them to develop, at one time, effective bargains on land use, livestock management, and dispute resolution. However, contemporary farmer-herder relations have devolved into recurring violent conflict. The literature on farmer-herder violence still struggles to explain why conflict recurs. In order to address this gap, I propose a theory of relational information, arguing that the problem with repeated interaction is not that it yields no information, but that it doesn’t yield the right kind. Standard bargaining accounts privilege information about an actor’s capabilities, intent, preferences, and resolve, all of which is strategic. This hyperfocus on strategic information leaves undertheorized relational information, which is information that actors use to distinguish between other actors, access the right actor to engage in bargaining, and verify claims about identities and affiliation made by the other party at the bargaining table. Using 113 interviews from Enugu, Edo, and Oyo State in South Nigeria, I show that strategic information can and often does coexist with low relational information, that losing relational information exacerbates violence, and that recovering such information improves the possibilities for effective bargaining. I also show that relational information in farmer-herder conflicts is lost through changes in traditional leadership, broken intergenerational transmission of intergroup history, and changing migration patterns.
Keywords: bargaining theory; incomplete information; relational information; repeated interaction; farmer-herder conflict
03
Making Peace Legible: Local Understandings and Measurement of Peace in Nigeria.
Abstract: How do local communities define peace in the everyday, and are those ways of knowing peace identifiable beyond community-level interactions? Despite the local turn’s motivation for grounded knowledge, the scholarship still faces methodological challenges rooted in questions about who, what, and where constitutes the “local”. This article examines whether locally identified understandings of peace remain meaningful beyond the communities in which they are articulated. Drawing on 70 interviews from Southwest and Southeast Nigeria, I combine structural topic modeling (STM) and thematic analysis to examine whether and how everyday peace indicators travel across communities to the Local Government Area level and across culturally distinct contexts experiencing the same conflict type. This methodological approach departs from the focus group-based elicitation commonly used in Everyday Peace Indicators research, allowing me to identify and compare patterns within and across communities at scale where ongoing violence made group-based data collection less feasible. I find that several indicators travel across culturally distinct regions, particularly those concerning mobility, participation in festivals, children playing together, the ability to remain at farms later in the day, and whether people speak freely with neighbors or in hushed tones. Religious participation and vehicle monitoring, however, remain context-dependent indicators. Religious participation, particularly whether religious services and peacebuilding efforts are multi-religious, differs between the Southwest and Southeast in ways that reflect their different demographic compositions. These findings demonstrate that “local” need not necessarily mean village- or community-specific within the same conflict type. Instead, the scalability of everyday peace indicators varies across domains, suggesting that locally grounded measures can travel across communities while remaining sensitive to social and demographic variation that conditions their meaning.
Keywords: Everyday Peace Indicators; peace measurement; local turn; peacebuilding; structural topic modeling; Nigeria
02
Signals Without Social Sight.
Relational Information and Bargaining Failure in Nigerian Farmer–Herder Conflict.
Asks why repeated contact sometimes fails to improve bargaining. It examines whether people can identify relevant actors, reach them, and verify claims about authority.
Selected writing
Published · 2024
With Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm. In Heritage in War and Peace, pp. 35–50. Springer.
Under review
Working Better Together: How Material and Symbolic Transitional Justice Affect Post-Civil War Peace.
Examines how material and symbolic approaches to transitional justice relate to peace after civil war.
Looking ahead
Future Research.
I plan to extend the bargaining research through farmer and herder accounts and study cross-border communication among pastoral communities in the Sahel.