Historicising Belonging: Autochthony, Internal Migration and Identity Formation in the Jos Plateau Area of Nigeria

Abstract

This article, is the first from a study that, examines the role of identity in contentious inter-group relations among the different religious and cultural groups that inhabit the Jos Plateau area of Nigeria. Violent conflicts, albeit intermittently, have occurred in the Jos Plateau area since 2001. The intermittent conflicts, in the area, have been referred to as the Jos crisis. The Jos crisis has attracted the attention of scholars of conflict management and peace studies who, in their search for a peaceful resolution of the crisis, have traced the causes of hostilities by residents to the fierce deployment of identity along ethnic and religious inclinations among other immediate and remote factors. Although these scholars have emphasised the role of identity in their analysis of the history of inter-group hostilities in the Jos Plateau area, they have however, not examined the process through which the local identities, that were mobilised during the violent confrontations that occurred, were created. To fill this gap, this and subsequent articles will contribute to the search for enduring peace in the Jos Plateau area by historicising the process of local identity formation so as to be able to decipher the particularities in the constitutive character and components of belonging that has made it fodder for conflictual inter-group relations in the area.