Nigeria's Farmer-Herder Conflict: Understanding the Violence in the Middle Belt

The farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria’s Middle Belt has claimed thousands of lives annually, sparking intense international debate about whether the violence constitutes a genocide against Christians. President Donald Trump recently threatened military intervention and aid cuts unless Nigeria addresses what he characterized as the systematic killing of Christians by Islamic terrorists. Yet beneath the headlines lies a far more complex reality—one where disputes over dwindling resources, climate change, ethnic divisions, and state failure converge to create a humanitarian catastrophe that defies simple explanations. The conflict pits semi-nomadic Fulani herders, predominantly Muslim, against sedentary farming communities, largely Christian, in a struggle over increasingly scarce arable land across Nigeria’s central regions.

The Genocide Debate and Political Context

President Trump’s threat to enter Nigeria ‘guns-a-blazing’ and his promise that any attack would be ‘fast, vicious, and sweet’ placed international spotlight on a crisis that has ravaged the nation for years. The characterization of the farmer-herder conflict as a Christian genocide has become a subject of active and ongoing debate across scholarly, conflict-analysis, religious, and political circles. Organizations including Genocide Watch, the International Committee on Nigeria, and the Hudson Institute fiercely advocate for global recognition of the violence as genocide. The classification has gained particular traction among the American political and religious right wing, with Senator Ted Cruz alleging Nigerian officials are ‘facilitating the mass murder of Christians by Islamist Jihadists’ and Congressman Riley Moore placing the death toll between fifty and one hundred thousand Christians.

Conversely, not-for-profit conflict trackers like ACLED, global journalistic institutes including the Associated Press, independent conflict experts, and the Nigerian government itself deny that the ‘Christian genocide’ label is appropriate. As an Associated Press article published in October succinctly explained: ‘The data disagrees.’ This disagreement isn’t merely academic—it has profound implications for international intervention, aid allocation, and how the global community understands and responds to the crisis. The debate reflects broader tensions about how conflicts are framed, who gets to define them, and whether religious persecution or resource competition should be understood as the primary driver of violence.

The Warring Parties: Farmers and Herders

Nigeria’s farmer-herder conflict involves two distinct groups with fundamentally different lifestyles competing for the same resources. The farmers are mostly sedentary, living in village communities at fixed, stable locations where they grow crops, tend to livestock and smaller animals, and intend to remain for many consecutive generations. The herders, conversely, are semi-nomadic in their lifestyle, traveling across the landscape in large groups and shepherding cattle, goats, and other animals along with them.

Both groups are present throughout Nigeria, but the conflict has been most intense in the Middle Belt—a region stretching across the center of the country that is ethnically and linguistically diverse, with predominantly Christian populations clustering further south and predominantly Muslim populations clustering further north. The violence is particularly concentrated in Plateau State and Benue State.

These communities aren’t just distinct in lifestyle—they’re also divided by ethnicity, language, and religion. Herding communities in this part of Nigeria are mostly from the Fulani ethnic group, estimated to include about 39 million people globally and about 15 million in Nigeria. They aren’t a majority population in any nation on Earth, but they make up a fairly large proportion of people in places like Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania.

Across Africa, Fulani are mostly Muslims, although some are Christian, and those who are tend to live in northern and central Nigeria, making them an important wrinkle in the religious divide that defines this conflict. Farming communities, meanwhile, are majority-Christian, especially as you travel further south, but they’re far from homogeneous, with mostly Muslim ethnic groups like the Hausa also caught up in the fighting. There are many farming communities in this part of Nigeria that are predominantly Christian, and those groups tend to be heavily involved in the fighting.

The Asymmetric Nature of Violence

The balance of power in this conflict heavily favors Fulani herding groups due to fundamental logistical realities. The Fulani are mobile, moving across unpredictable paths without announcing their destinations to surrounding communities, and they live nomadic lives predicated on the idea that they’ll always be transient. Farming communities, on the other hand, are sitting ducks.

Because they’re tied to their farmlands, they couldn’t move elsewhere even if they wanted to, and they lack the resources to regularly patrol, conduct scouting and reconnaissance, or otherwise keep tabs on Fulani groups moving throughout their region. They can, and often will, organize local militias for self-defense, but it’s the herders who usually choose where, when, and how violent engagements take place.

If herders decide to appear in the dead of night on the edge of a farming community where everybody aside from a few night guards are probably asleep, they’ll be able to launch a rapid assault on their own terms. This is not a part of Nigeria where either the military or local law enforcement are strong enough to intervene. When firefights break out between farmers and herders, each side is on their own, and given that farmers are often fighting at a meaningful disadvantage, the results tend to match. This asymmetry explains why farming communities suffer disproportionate casualties and why the conflict has been characterized by some as one-sided violence against Christians, even though the reality involves violence flowing in both directions.

The Escalating Violence of 2025

In 2025, farmer-herder confrontations have taken place with ever-increasing frequency, and the biggest moments of the conflict essentially constitute a list of massacres. At least fifty people were slaughtered in villages across two mass attacks in April. Seventy-four were killed by herders in the span of a single weekend in May. Possibly upwards of two hundred villagers were slaughtered in an attack in June.

Over twenty were killed by unknown gunmen in July. Well over fifty were killed at a mosque in August. Twelve armed forest guards were killed on patrol in September. Dozens were killed in a series of raids in October.

These represent just the largest attacks, not even counting the innumerable instances where one villager here, or two villagers there, might be killed in more limited confrontations with herding communities.

The attacks don’t only move in one direction. Although it’s less common for farming communities to engage herders at scale on their terms, armed farmers frequently corner herders moving in small groups or by themselves, often killing their cattle and sometimes killing herders as well. If farming communities are aware of a herding group in their area that they consider to be a threat, they’ll sometimes engage in raids of their own, getting the better of shootouts with Fulani gunmen—although at times those temporary victories can result in catastrophic counterattacks from vengeful herders. Operating within the constraints of their more rooted lifestyle, farming communities aren’t able to carry out the kinds of reprisals that would be truly proportional to the violence inflicted upon them, but their conduct has shown repeatedly that some among their number are more than happy to get revenge against herding communities when the opportunity presents itself, and often attack herders on the basis that they’re herders, just as farmers are attacked on the basis that they’re farmers.

The Challenge of Counting the Dead

Because of the highly asymmetric, highly rural, and often isolated nature of the violence between these groups, it’s very difficult to establish a clear death toll. Bodies can sometimes be hard to find, and aggregate numbers are even harder to track, except in the case of large-scale massacres that draw national and global attention, or individual killings that happen to be well-documented. Communities on both sides are well-accustomed to recovering and burying their dead with little if any attempt to involve the Nigerian government. At this point, after decades of low-grade conflict, all sides are well-accustomed to caring for the dead themselves, with no expectation that the world would even care to hear about a total count of casualties.

Year-over-year, most expert analysis places the likely death toll somewhere between one thousand people in less intense years and several thousand in more intense years. The casualty counts presented by American politicians, including that estimate of fifty to a hundred thousand Christians murdered in this conflict, would seem to be an overcount when it comes to farmer-herder engagements specifically. However, if they’re aggregating their numbers across decades and accounting for all of Nigeria’s many parallel conflicts instead of just this one, it’s easier to see how they’d get to a death toll that high. This discrepancy in casualty figures further complicates the debate about how to characterize and respond to the violence.

The Land Crisis: Shrinking Resources and Changing Climate

According to most experts who’ve studied the farmer-herder conflict at length, any discussion of what’s driving the violence must start with the problem of land, and more specifically, land-sharing. Despite all their differences, farming communities and herding communities have something important in common: both depend on access to safe, fertile soil to sustain their livelihoods. Farmers need arable land to grow their crops, and herders need arable land that naturally grows grasses or edible scrub plants where their livestock can graze as they travel across the landscape. As long as there’s enough arable land to sustain both groups, that mutual dependence shouldn’t be a problem—but unfortunately, it’s been a very long time since Nigeria’s Middle Belt had enough land to go around.

Decade by decade, the land in this part of Nigeria has been changing. Droughts carry on for longer than they used to, and when it does rain, it rains noticeably less than it once did. Agriculturally productive lands have been degraded after decades and decades of farming practices that were less than sustainable.

The overall proportion of arable land is shrinking, as rainfall in some areas is no longer enough to sustain what used to be normal growth, and the dry, cracked dirt of the Sahel region slowly starts to take over, making way for the eventual arrival of the expanding Sahara some decades from now. As a result, there’s much less land to go around. Herders absolutely must graze their livestock on something, lest those livestock die and lest those herders and their families lose their livelihoods.

Farmers absolutely must till whatever lands they still can, or else they’ll lose their livelihoods, and they’ll also lose those livelihoods if roaming herders come along and let their livestock eat the crops that those farmers were depending on.

The Breakdown of Traditional Systems

As the decades roll by, the land crisis has only gotten worse. During the colonial period in this part of Nigeria, herders were able to move along established migration routes while farmers tilled separate lands, and that system functioned relatively well. But that system has broken down. Farmers have settled and claimed those lands, partly to try and increase their revenues or settle new communities, but more and more often because the land they formerly relied on has been depleted.

Herders have had to change their own migration routes, moving away from lands that no longer support grazing.

Herders have taken advantage of modern medicines that allow them to move into more fertile southern regions—historically the domain of farming groups with larger and larger Christian majorities as they move further southward—without risking the deaths of their livestock due to tropical disease. But they’ve grown less and less welcome there, not just because they’re treading on agricultural lands and sometimes grazing from them, but because the livestock, the milk, and the other goods that the herding groups used to offer in barter exchanges with friendly farming communities are no longer valued by farmers in the way they once were. Herders are drawn even farther southward to try and sell their livestock at better prices, but where they go, the entire herd needs to come with them. As both farmers and herders try to adjust to the changing environment they rely on, both groups have reason to guard their resources more carefully and to see whether they can get away with encroaching on the resources of the other.

The Climate Change Controversy

Concerns about the climate have become their own flashpoint when discussing this conflict in the West, and especially in the United States. When analysts claim that the label of a ‘genocide’ doesn’t fit Nigeria’s situation, politicians and faith leaders on the religious right respond with some version of ‘Well, you’re just pretending this is all about climate change.’ But separating this conflict from both partisan debates in the US and even the wider argument about the world’s climate, the situation on the ground in this part of Nigeria is well-documented. Arable land is shrinking, water is growing more scarce, soil quality is deteriorating quickly, and those changes in the local climate force these farming and herding groups into closer and closer proximity.

As that process continues, conflict becomes more likely, as every interaction between the groups is transformed into a potential flashpoint. The environmental factors aren’t a matter of political ideology or global climate debate—they’re observable realities that directly impact the daily survival strategies of both farming and herding communities. Whether one accepts broader theories about global climate change or not, the local environmental degradation in Nigeria’s Middle Belt is undeniable and serves as a fundamental driver of the conflict, even if it’s not the only factor at play.

Weapons Proliferation and Poverty

The violence is accelerated further by a pair of overlapping problems: the prevalence of small arms that communities can easily access, and the broader state of poverty that many Nigerians in these areas deal with. When it comes to weapons, global observers suspect that there are many thousands of automatic and semi-automatic firearms circulating through the Middle Belt, both because Nigeria is awash with those weapons more generally, and because its porous borders and largely unregulated interior make for a perfect set of conditions for arms traffickers. Nigeria’s many overlapping insurgencies have each persevered for years or even decades, meaning that there are so many weapons in circulation by this point, and so much demand for smugglers to ensure that more guns are flowing inward, that they’re easy to come by, even for communities that don’t have much.

Speaking of not having much, both farming and herding communities in these areas have few other options if their ability to subsist off herding or agriculture were to collapse. Few people are able to access advanced or private education, other opportunities are scarce, and if people did want to improve their prospects in some other way, they’d have to uproot themselves from their communities and take a massive gamble in the nation’s cities or abroad. For people who’ve chosen to remain in the Middle Belt, or who feel they have no other options, there’s no choice except to try and maintain their way of life, however they can—and when farmers and herders come into conflict, the stakes are raised even higher. The combination of readily available weapons and desperate economic circumstances creates conditions where violence becomes an increasingly attractive option for communities that see no other path to survival.

State Failure and the Security Vacuum

Nigeria’s national state of affairs doesn’t help either. The country faces a much larger problem with multidimensional insurgent violence that bears repeating. Across large parts of the country, the security situation is dire. Groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State engage in regular acts of mass violence.

Transnational insurgencies use Nigeria’s porous borders to seek safe harbor. Another faction—organized criminals known as bandits—often carry out their own mass killings and operate in the same areas, pursuing other goals, in places where the farmer-herder conflict is already an existential threat.

Nigeria’s military is hardly able to cope. It’s overstretched, undertrained, undermotivated, and quite corrupt, while in many areas its soldiers are known for their own tendency to carry out atrocities. The problem of corruption travels all the way through Nigeria’s civil and military leadership, and national politicians tend to pour resources into the well-populated and more influential cities of the southern coast in order to protect their power base, while either minimizing or outright ignoring problems in the Middle Belt and the Nigerian Sahel in the north.

It’s not just that the Nigerian government can’t intervene, although it’s not clear that it would be very effective even if it gave its genuine best effort. The nation’s leadership and its military won’t intervene, even if lives could be saved in the process. This state failure creates a security vacuum where communities must fend for themselves, perpetuating cycles of violence and revenge that have no prospect of outside mediation or enforcement of peace.

The Religious Dimension: Beyond Simple Narratives

Nigeria’s farmer-herder conflict isn’t solely explained by religion—but it’s not as if religion doesn’t play a factor. Even accounting for land disputes, resource scarcity, environmental change, the prevalence of deadly weapons, and the breakdown of Nigeria’s ability to govern these areas effectively, this is still a conflict with predominantly Muslim herders on one side, and predominantly Christian farmers on the other, where those Christian farming communities are on the receiving end of an outsize share of the violence. Understanding the true relevance of religion in this conflict requires embracing nuance and accepting that multiple realities exist simultaneously.

The religious element cannot be dismissed, but neither can it be isolated as the sole or even primary driver of violence. The conflict exists at the intersection of resource competition, environmental degradation, state failure, and religious identity—each factor amplifying and complicating the others. This complexity makes the conflict particularly resistant to simple solutions and especially vulnerable to mischaracterization by outside observers who may have their own political or ideological reasons for emphasizing one factor over others.

The Case Against Religious Genocide Classification

Analysts who contend that this is not a primarily religious conflict, and that it doesn’t constitute a genocide against Christians, point to several compelling pieces of evidence. Most significantly, sedentary communities of all faiths—whether they’re Christian or Muslim—tend to come under attack by roving armed bands. Sometimes those attackers are herders, sometimes they’re bandits, they’re usually but not always Muslim, but they’re attacking sedentary communities to acquire resources, not to wipe out people of a different faith.

While these statistics require moving slightly outside the strict definition of the farmer-herder conflict, an overall majority of people killed in roving attacks are Muslim, because those statistics also account for the deaths of people targeted by bandits in the Muslim-majority north. In that sense, it’s hardly rational to say that these attackers are perpetrating a genocide against Christians if the majority of people in their crosshairs tend to be Muslim. Those figures include some of the largest massacres of 2025, particularly August’s attack at a mosque in the country’s northwest, where many dozens of innocent people were slaughtered.

Adding to the argument that Nigeria’s killings aren’t primarily a result of faith is the fact that attacks on civilians across the country are tracked whenever possible, and in incidents that can be properly catalogued, the numbers simply don’t bear out the idea that Christianity is an outsize driver of violence. According to ACLED, which tracks these deaths fairly rigorously, 20,409 civilians were recorded as killed in Nigeria across nearly 12,000 individual attacks between January 2020 and September of this year. Of those, only 317 deaths—or about 1.5 percent of the total—were credibly identified as instances where a Christian person was killed either fully or partially on the basis of their identity.

In fact, Muslims suffered a higher share of targeted attacks with religion as a motivating factor during that same time period, with 417 Muslims killed for that reason, or just a bit over two percent of the nationwide total. Going by those figures, it’s not reasonable to claim that there’s a large-scale genocide targeting any religious group in Nigeria, but if there was, there’s a slightly stronger case to say that there’s a genocide against Muslims. Indeed, Muslim advocates and observers of this conflict have levied those same allegations around farmer-herder violence, just like Christian advocates and observers do, in defense of Nigeria’s Christians.

The Data Gap Problem

There’s more to the story, starting with the fact that attempts to collect data are woefully incomplete. As much as ACLED and other monitoring groups try to catalogue what they can, as well as they can, this is a conflict where many deaths aren’t reported in the first place—including in communities that may be witnessing the deaths of Christians due to their faith, but may choose, for any number of reasons, to handle those deaths privately using their own resources.

Just as important, many of the zones where low-grade farmer-herder confrontations are constant are also zones that are harder to access, and where ordinary people are less trusting of the outsiders that do manage to get there. Underreporting is a real challenge, and while it’s unlikely that there’s such a reporting gap that an entire full-scale genocide could go unnoticed, there’s legitimate reason to fear that deaths could be going uncounted. This data gap creates space for competing narratives about the conflict’s true nature and scale, with different groups able to point to the incomplete picture as evidence supporting their particular interpretation of events.

Religion as Pretext and Accelerant

It’s important to consider edge cases where religion isn’t actually the primary motivator for a killing, but where it’s either used as pretext to gin up support for violent action, or where a larger animosity partly based on a religious divide makes people more willing to resort to violence when disputes arise. If religion is used as pretext, that can take many forms—say, the leaders of a Muslim herding group psyching their fighters up before an attack by using religious rhetoric and justifying an attack on a Christian farming community, even though the actual purpose of that attack is to steal resources or intimidate locals into compliance.

Or it can look like local Christian leaders trying to rally fighting-age men to join a local militia by emphasizing that their Christian community is under threat from Muslim outsiders, making it more likely that people will pick up a gun, and thus more likely that their gun will ultimately be used to claim lives on the opposing side. To see the issue that a wider religious animosity can bring, just zoom outward with that same logic: communities that spend years fighting rivals who live differently, worship differently, come from different backgrounds, and operate violently at cross purposes are going to build a deep and bitter resentment.

Religion, in Nigeria as much as anywhere else, is a very potent vessel to carry that resentment, and it can end up becoming a focal point for the rage of community members on both sides. This dynamic transforms religion from a mere demographic characteristic into an active force that shapes how violence unfolds, even when resource competition remains the fundamental driver of conflict.

The Genocide Label: Strategic Implications

Whether or not this state of affairs constitutes a technical definition of a Christian genocide isn’t the question to emphasize most when trying to understand this conflict. On many occasions throughout history, it has been vitally important for advocates to insist that a genocide is underway, to push through denialism and false pretenses, and force the world to recognize mass acts of violence for what they are: an outright, violent offensive that’s intended to systemically destroy an entire targeted group.

But the reason that recognizing genocides is important isn’t just because it raises awareness and honors victims while rallying the world to react to an ongoing mass atrocity. It’s also important because it cuts through the other, insufficient justifications that a genocide’s perpetrators will use to excuse their actions. To call a genocide a genocide is to cut to the very core of that persecution, and to explicitly point out that these mass atrocities are taking place in order to purge the victims from our world.

However, there’s an equal and opposite danger that comes from applying that label of genocide if it doesn’t actually address the root causes of a conflict. When a conflict is fought over some other fundamental issue, where matters of race, ethnicity, nationality, or in this case religion are an accelerant to violence but aren’t the core cause, then focusing on the accelerant can be much less effective than advocates might hope. In fact, it can even drive an escalation further into a state of conflict by making an issue like religion even more salient and even more polarizing than it otherwise might have been.

That’s not to say that a religious element to a conflict should ever be ignored. Instead, this observation matters because as compelling and as dire as the threat of religious persecution obviously is, addressing that religious persecution doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re addressing the fundamental cause of a conflict. Maybe, after taking all of the overlapping factors presented in Nigeria’s farmer-herder conflict, one comes to the conclusion that this conflict is a genocide against Christians.

Maybe the conclusion is that it’s not. Regardless, Christian civilians are dying in the thousands in Nigeria, and it’s important to make that stop, just as it’s important to put an end to the wholesale slaughter of any civilians, of any faith, in any place across the globe.

The Path Forward: Addressing Root Causes

For anyone looking to put a stop to the conflict, now including the political and religious leaders of the American right, the real question to ask is whether they’ll bring peace more effectively by focusing on religious persecution of Christians, or by focusing on other systemic divides in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, or by doing both at once. The right answer is the one that makes the killing stop.

Effective intervention requires understanding that this conflict emerges from the convergence of environmental degradation, resource scarcity, state failure, weapons proliferation, poverty, and yes, religious and ethnic divisions. Addressing only one factor while ignoring the others is unlikely to produce lasting peace. Solutions must account for the land crisis driving farmers and herders into competition, the climate changes reducing available resources, the security vacuum created by state failure, the easy availability of weapons, and the economic desperation that makes violence seem like a viable option for survival.

At the same time, the religious dimension cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. Even if religion isn’t the primary driver, it shapes how communities understand the conflict, how they mobilize for violence, and how they justify attacks against their neighbors. Any comprehensive peace effort must address both the material conditions driving the conflict and the religious identities that have become intertwined with it. The challenge for international actors, including those threatening intervention, is whether they can develop responses sophisticated enough to address this complexity rather than imposing simplified narratives that may ultimately make the situation worse.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is the farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria a genocide against Christians?

This is actively debated. Organizations like Genocide Watch and conservative political figures classify it as genocide, while conflict trackers like ACLED and independent experts argue the data doesn’t support this characterization. According to ACLED, only 1.5% of civilian deaths between January 2020 and September 2025 were credibly identified as Christians killed based on their identity, while Muslims actually suffered a slightly higher share (2%) of religiously-motivated attacks. However, significant underreporting in rural areas makes complete data collection difficult.

What are the root causes of the farmer-herder conflict?

The conflict stems from multiple compounding factors: shrinking arable land due to environmental degradation and drought, breakdown of traditional migration routes that once separated farmers and herders, widespread poverty limiting alternative livelihoods, easy access to automatic and semi-automatic firearms, and a Nigerian government that is too corrupt, overstretched, and unwilling to intervene effectively in the Middle Belt region.

Why do farming communities suffer more casualties than herders?

Farming communities are at a tactical disadvantage because they’re tied to their farmlands and cannot relocate. Fulani herders are mobile, moving along unpredictable paths, which allows them to choose when, where, and how violent engagements occur. Herders can launch surprise attacks in the dead of night on sedentary communities, while farmers lack resources for regular patrols or reconnaissance. This asymmetry results in farming communities suffering disproportionate casualties.

What role does environmental degradation play in the conflict?

Environmental degradation is a fundamental driver of the conflict. Droughts last longer, rainfall has decreased, and agriculturally productive lands have been degraded by unsustainable farming practices. The overall proportion of arable land is shrinking as the Sahel region expands. This forces farmers and herders into closer proximity and competition for dwindling resources, transforming every interaction into a potential flashpoint, regardless of any broader debates about global climate change.

Why doesn’t the Nigerian government intervene to stop the violence?

Nigeria’s military is overstretched, undertrained, undermotivated, and corrupt, facing multiple insurgencies including Boko Haram, Islamic State-West Africa Province, bandits, and other groups. Corruption extends through civil and military leadership, and national politicians prioritize resources for well-populated southern coastal cities to protect their power base while minimizing or ignoring problems in the Middle Belt and northern Sahel. It’s not just that the government can’t intervene effectively—it won’t intervene.

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