Political Violence and Radicalization in the North- Eastern Nigeria: Analyzing the Youth Bulge Phenomenon

Abstract

Political Violence has recently become a recurring decimal in Northern
Nigeria especially in the North-Eastern part of the country where peace
seems to have eluded the region since 2009. Several scholarly inputs were
propounded in an attempt to address and find a lasting solution to the
persistent incidence of violence ravaging the region. This article is another
attempt geared toward addressing the problem by looking at it from a different
perspective that is the youth Bulge Phenomenon. It is the conception of this
paper that, the genesis, the life span and the demise of political violence is
greatly influence by the socio-cultural and political environment surrounding
it. To understand political violence and the factors that breed it, one has to
understand the environment that actually nurtured it. In other words, without
understanding the socio-political attributes of a given population, one will not
understand the causes of insurgency within it. This paper views environment
as a key factor in understanding the political violence within the context of
the North-Eastern Nigeria. It examines environment from a demographic
parlance and adopts the youth Bulge theory and the social identity theory to
conceptually analyse the key elements that continue to shape and mould the
growth of political violence in the North-Eastern Nigeria, where institutional
weakness due to poor governance, social categorization and the formation
of social network were discovered to be the contributing factors to the
menace.