The Moral Economy of the Agatu “Massacre”: Reterritorializing Farmer-Herder Relations

The Agatu “Massacre” is a conflict between pastoralists and farmers in the Agatu area of Benue State, Nigeria. The conflict is significant because of the event’s gravity, but no scholarly inquiry that involves thoughtful and reflective methodological and theoretical approaches has been made. This paper investigates how the farmer-herder relations in Agatu became a violent crisis and situates it within relevant literature to fill gaps in farmer-herder conflicts literature in Africa. Existing literature demonstrates the pertinence of moral economies for resource use, spatial pattern, and manifestations of conflicts in developing and developed worlds. However, studies have yet to use the moral economy concept to explore the African farmer-herder conflicts from a political ecology perspective. This paper demonstrates that the Agatu crisis emerged due to reterritorializations in the moral economy of farmers and herders, disrupting their social ties. It further illustrates that the violence in Agatu was caused by the deviation from the traditional approach to addressing the damage done to crops by herding livestock. Nevertheless, the paper argues that this deviation is the consequence of modifications in the moral economy of farmers and herders driven by the aspiration for financial gain rather than the subsistence of agro-pastoral relations. The paper argues that changes in moral economies can disrupt social relations and lead to farmer-herder conflicts, leading to the exclusion of pastoralists from resource access through policy and legislation.