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deprivation, including racial riots and student protest events in which the participants were neither the most disadvantaged nor deprived in their groups (Guimond and Dube-simond, 1974). Many scholars highlight these contradictions and contend that discontent as argued by the RD theory is not always a major factor to explaining militant attitudes and protest behaviours (McPhail, 1971; Oberschall, 1978; Snow, Zurcher, and Ekland-Olson, 1980).
Despite these criticisms however, the theory remains relevant in understanding the origin of some cases aggression and social disorder. Crosby (1976) concludes after an extensive review of the literature, that "most of the empirical data coming from over 95 different investigations supports the theory" (p. 109).
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marginalisation and resource capture by groups confronted with resource scarcity, it has thrown up what appears to many as a new security issue in Nigeria. Hindsight shows however, that the increased attention now given to these contestations are not indicators of their increasing scales per se, but rather, an indicator of the diminishing attention on Boko Haram terrorism due to recent successes recorded by the state in combating the menace, and the shift in attention to a hitherto largely unreported security threat (farmer-herder conflict).
Just as the ecology-violence dynamics is well captured in eco-violence analysis, the psycho- social dimension of aggression is captured by Dollard’s F-A theory (Burke et al., 2009; Nel and Righarts, 2008; Slettebak, 2012). The articulation of frustration as a driving factor of aggressive behaviour in the climate change-conflict transformation process in Nigeria has been espoused by narratives highlighting the various levels of vulnerability: from the pressure imposed by drought and desertification on herders which spur migratory adaptation, to loss of expected levels of productivity, to increased threat from cattle rustlers in transitory routes, and to the plight of farmers in host communities who experience loss of crops to encroaching cattle herders among other risks.
The socialisation of this frustration-induced aggression is the main theme of Gurr’s Relative Deprivation hypothesis in which the power resources which underpin feelings of frustration assume a socio-comparative character (Korpi, 1974; Brush, 2006). This socialisation of frustration and deprivation creates a social force for conflict among groups. Between 2015 and 2016, the increased prominence of herder-farmer problems in different parts of the country have combined with the new matrix of power following the emergence of a northern Fulani as President of the country on May 29, 2015 in the person of Muhammadu Buhari.
This socialisation of tension is seen in recent media and public discourse on the underlying motivations for recurring confrontation and violence.
Furthermore, the extended outcomes of these interconnected frames are seen in the effect of environmental change on primary and secondary population movements. This is central to explaining the dissipation of tension through rural-urban migration. When considered as an integrated lens for understanding conflict transformation, the relationship between climate change, declining rural economies, population movement and security in primary and secondary migrant receiving areas are not far-fetched. Whether this linkage manifests through environmental declines or through secondary vulnerabilities such as resource contestations
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and push functions from rural urban areas, the environment-security dynamics are apparent (Baron, 2006; Kennedy et al., 1998).
The use of these frameworks is not novel in the current study. A number of studies have adapted them either combined, or individually, in demonstrating the links between environmental variability and social contestations or conflict. An important defining element however, is the robust exploration of contextual and systemic factors which give empirical validity to the operationalisation of the theories. For example, Slettebak (2012) observe that the primary connections inferred in by Homer-Dixon’s eco-violence approach anchor on the context-sensitive transition from environment-induced stress and frustration to secondary factors such as contestation for scarce resources, and/or migration. This in turn engenders a feeling of deprivation among individuals that is, in relation to the context, capable of evoking a sense of solidarity among members around their vulnerabilities that may breed aggression and conflict.
The socio-economic context is a defining element and this is adequately represented in the three analytical frames. For example, the socio-economic setting is important to conflict transformation because climate change has the capacity to “widen the disparity between the
‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ both within and between nations” (Weissbecker, 2011: 105), especially in the face of inadequate support systems. Barnett and Adger (2007: 643) highlights the relevance of context to Relative Deprivation theory viz a viz the links between climate change violent conflict in pointing to “the spatial differentiation of climate impacts and the sensitivity of places to them”. According to them, when there are no alternatives, climate change has the potential to directly increase absolute, relative, and transient poverty by undermining access to natural capital.
Hauge & Ellingsen (1998) and Olaniyan, Francis and Okeke-Uzodike (2015) among others, affirm a positive correlation between decreasing access to renewable resources and higher levels of frustration among affected population in resource dependent societies, which in turn, results in individual and broader forms of grievances including those directed towards the state, with broader non-direct but equally consequential effects including weakening of the capacity of the state as well as creating the conducive environment for the instigation of insurrection among the population.
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Both Obioha (2008) and Isiugo and Obioha (2015) combine F-A theory with group identity and structural theories in his review of the effect of population drift in northern Nigeria. In the same vein, Ubhenin (2012), using the relative deprivation framework, tried to understand the main causal chains between climate change and violent conflict, and to identify theories which are helpful in explaining climate change and violent conflict linkages, observed that there is substantial evidence of climate conflict dimension to Nigeria’s many violent conflict in emerging empirical literature. The author argued that relative deprivation theory “helps to situate the restiveness among Nigerian youths and their preference for violence to the use of words” (p. 534).