Reducing Violence versus Building Trust: The Joint Effect of Top-down and Bottom-up Peacebuilding Interventions in Nigeria

Reducing Violence versus Building Trust: The Joint Effect of Top-down and Bottom-up Peacebuilding Interventions in Nigeria

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Cattle herder in Nigeria
A herder with his cattle in northern Nigeria. © 2020 Shutterstock/Tayvay

Co-funded by IPA’s Peace and Recovery Initiative, researchers worked with Mercy Corps, USAID, and PARE to assess the individual program impacts of a bundled program addressing communal violence in North Central Nigeria. The study evaluated mediation training for leaders and a community dialogue program between farming and herding communities. The mediation training alone was most effective in reducing violence and fostering social cohesion.

Fueled by scarce resources, farmer-herder tensions in North Central Nigeria have grown increasingly violent. Peacebuilding interventions that address communal violence in multi-ethnic societies tend to draw upon two main theories: bottom-up theories aiming to build social cohesion at the community level, and top-down theories promoting conflict mediation to quell violence. However, these interventions are often implemented in bundled programs, making it difficult to determine which intervention components affect particular outcomes.

In partnership with Mercy Corps, USAID, and PARE, researchers sought to understand the separate effects of bundled interventions focused on farmer-herder violence in North Central Nigeria. This study is the second in a two-part series in which researchers randomly assigned 88 communities in Benue, Kogi, and Plateau states to receive either a top-down interest-based mediation and negotiation (IBMN) training for leaders, a bottom-up community dialogue program, both interventions, or neither. In the first study, researchers randomly assigned communities to receive the IBMN training for leaders or serve as a comparison group.

For this second study, researchers randomly selected half of the communities from both the intervention and comparison groups to participate in a dialogue intervention, which brought together conflicting groups to discuss their perceptions of the conflict and build stronger relationships. From October to December 2022, researchers surveyed a random subset of 4,398 households across all four groups who were asked about their perceptions of violence, security, and social cohesion with the groups that were most in conflict.

The IBMN training, when delivered alone, had strong positive impacts on reducing violence and improving security. Communities with trained leaders also saw improvements in social cohesion, behaviors, attitudes, and norms. While this change in attitudes was not significant one year after the intervention, it was at three years. Communities that only received the dialogue intervention showed little change. Combining the two programs led to slightly higher effects, though these were not statistically significant from the IBMN training on its own.


Implementing Partners

USAIDMercy Corps

Funding Partner

UKaid