COERCED DISORGANIZATION: RETHINKING SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION THEORY FOR ARMED RURAL COMMUNITIES IN ZAMFARA STATE, NIGERIA
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Coerced Disorganization, Social Disorganization Theory, Collective Efficacy, Rural Banditry, Community Security
Abstract
Social Disorganization Theory is routinely applied to insecurity in northwestern Nigeria, yet it was formulated to explain urban crime, where weak collective efficacy emerges gradually from poverty, residential turnover and population heterogeneity. This study asks whether that causal architecture holds where disorganization is not an emergent by-product of urban ecology but a deliberate objective of armed actors. It aims to specify how community-level social control breaks down in Zamfara State and what theoretical adjustment this requires. The research employs a qualitative documentary design, analysing peer-reviewed criminological and conflict scholarship, Nigerian statutory instruments, government and security-sector publications, and reports of international and independent research organisations, coded against four categories fixed in advance: the institution targeted, the mechanism of degradation, the actor initiating it, and the resulting change in informal social control. The findings show that the principal institutions of informal control in Zamfara - traditional rulership, schooling, markets and settlement itself - are not merely weakened by structural disadvantage but directly and selectively attacked, and that residents withdraw from collective action less from anomie than from a rational fear of retaliation that intensifies precisely where community capacity would otherwise be strongest. The study advances the concept of coerced disorganization and distinguishes it from the emergent disorganization of the Chicago tradition along four dimensions: causal origin, temporality, reversibility and the direction of the collective-efficacy relationship. It concludes that where disorganization is coercively produced, community-strengthening interventions cannot precede physical protection without exposing participants to targeted violence, inverting the sequencing implicit in conventional community-security programming.
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