Communal Conflict and Environmental Degradation in Rural Nigeria: A Critical Review of Institutional Rupture, Landscape Change and Pathways to Environmental Peacebuilding

Abstract

Rural Nigeria has become one of the most intensively studied settings in the global debate on whether environmental change causes violence, yet the scholarship remains divided between accounts that treat degradation and climatic stress as proximate drivers of communal violence and accounts that treat violence as a symptom of collapsed institutional arrangements governing land, mobility and access. This review evaluates that literature critically, with three objectives: to assess the strength and consistency of evidence linking environmental change to communal conflict in rural Nigeria; to examine the reverse pathway through which sustained violence reshapes land use, vegetation and resource governance; and to appraise the empirical basis for environmental peacebuilding proposals now being advanced for the country. Peer-reviewed studies published between 1994 and mid-2026 were identified through general, biomedical and African scholarly indexes, supplemented by citation searching, and were appraised for design adequacy, measurement validity and consistency with independent evidence. Three findings emerge. First, evidence that climatic and ecological stress independently causes communal violence in Nigeria is weaker and more conditional than policy discourse implies; effects appear contingent on tenure arrangements, mobility rules and dispute-resolution capacity. Second, the reverse pathway is comparatively well supported: violence alters cropping decisions, displaces populations, concentrates resource extraction around settlements and produces landscape signals that are readily misread as ecological recovery. Third, environmental peacebuilding proposals rest largely on theoretical mechanisms and case narratives rather than on evaluated interventions, and carry documented risks of exclusion when applied without attention to distributional politics. The dominant weakness of the field is inferential rather than descriptive: conflict-event data, satellite-derived land-cover records and household surveys are rarely integrated at compatible scales, and almost no study establishes the temporal ordering required for causal claims. Progress requires longitudinal, spatially explicit designs that treat institutional arrangements as measured variables rather than background context, and prospective evaluation of governance interventions before further scaling.