Book Project

Organizing Election Violence: Politicians and Armed Groups in Nigeria

Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press and the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series

What explains the targeting of lethal election-related violence? Why is violence selectively targeted against candidates for office, party workers, or voters during some elections and indiscriminate in others? In answering this question, the book draws attention to the joint production of election violence by politicians and different types of armed groups in Nigeria, a country with some of the highest death tolls from election violence in the world. It argues that politicians are more likely to resort to lethal violence to rig elections when their agreements over state patronage collapse, and they fail to resolve these disputes as they enter the campaign period. Politicians rarely, if ever, perpetrate lethal violence themselves; instead, they recruit different actors to fight on their behalf. In Nigeria, such actors have included groups mobilizing for wide-reaching political reforms, such as Boko Haram and the Ijaw Youth Council, those with close, well-established ties with politicians, such as the National Union of Road Transport Workers, and actors with more volatile relations with political elites, such as gangs in the oil-rich Niger Delta. The overarching goals of these groups, I argue, and what they seek to achieve with election violence, help to make sense of when and why lethal violence is selective or indiscriminate in its targeting. To support its claims, the book draws on a rich array of qualitative data and comparative case studies from Nigeria. The findings enrich our understanding of the mechanisms that underpin the mobilization and escalation of violence during elections, the motivations of different actors and the consequences for the targeting of violence, and how the joint production of violence in earlier elections influences violence and its dynamics in later elections.