'Balance of Terror' -- Rival Militias and Vigilantes in Nigeria

Militias and vigilantes that assume public authority by fighting crime reject the laws of the state, yet they have no other set of rules to regulate their activities. Many of them claim to be accountable to their ethnic or religious community on whose behalf they operate. But their communities have found no means to institutionalise control over them. Moreover, there are no institutions to settle conflicts between different militias and vigilantes. On a local level, rival groups have reached informal arrangements. However, these compromises are unstable, as they reflect fragile alliances and shifting balances of power. Leaders of militias and other 'self-determination groups' have suggested organising a conference of all ethnic nationalities in Nigeria in order to design a new constitution that would give militias and vigilantes a legal role and define their authority. But the groups compared in this article – Oodua People's Congress, Sharia Vigilantes, Bakassi Boys, MASSOB, and Niger Delta militias – pursue very divergent interests, and they are far from reaching a consensus on how to contain violence between them.

Anomic Crime in Post-Welfarist Societies. Cult of the Individual, Integration Patterns and Delinquency

Post-Fordist economies come along with post-welfarist societies marked by intensified cultural individualism and increased structural inequalities. These conditions are commonly held to be conducive to relative deprivation and, thereby, anomic crime. At the same time, post-welfarist societies develop a new ‘balance of power’ between institutions providing for welfare regulation, such as the family, the state and the (labour) market – and also the penal system. These institutions are generally expected to improve social integration, ensure conformity and thus reduce anomic crime. Combining both perspectives, we analyse the effects of moral individualism, social inequality, and different integration strategies on crime rates in contemporary societies through the lenses of anomie theory. To test our hypotheses, we draw on time-series cross-section data compiled from different data sources (OECD, UN, WHO, WDI) for twenty developed countries in the period 1970-2004, and run multiple regressions that control for country-specific effects. Although we find some evidence that the mismatch between cultural ideal (individual inclusion) and structural reality (stratified exclusion) increases the anomic pressure, whereas conservative (i. e. family-based), social-democratic (i. e. state-based) and liberal (i. e. market-based) integration strategies to a certain extent prove effective in controlling the incidence of crime, the results are not very robust. Moreover, reservations have to be made regarding the effects of “market” income inequality as well as familialist, unionist and liberalist employment policies that are shown to have reversed effects in our sample: the former reducing, the latter occasionally increasing anomic crime. As expected, the mismatch between cultural ideal (individual inclusion) and structural reality (stratified exclusion) increases the anomic pressure, whereas conservative (i. e. family-based), social-democratic (i. e. state-based) and liberal (i. e. market-based) integration strategies generally prove effective in controlling the incidence of crime. Nevertheless, we conclude that the new cult of the individual undermines the effectiveness of conservative and social-democratic integration strategies and drives societies towards more “liberal” regimes that build on incentive as well as punitive elements.