Peace as governmentality: Systemic violence in the urban governance of migration

This paper investigates the complex, contested nature of order-making in rapidly expanding African cities, focusing on the intersection of hybrid governance and everyday peace. Extending the urban turn in peace studies we examine how peace is sought and realised amidst rapid urbanization and social tensions in ‘everyday’ Nigerian cities. Drawing on qualitative and ethnographic data from a cross-section of cities – Lagos, Lokoja/Obajana, and Jos – our findings highlight the need to recognise urban peace as being plural and both spatially and temporally fragmented. Focussing on the intersections of everyday peace(s) with hybrid and civic governmentality, we argue for a conceptual move to “mosaics of urbans peaces” as a means of deepening understandings of the everyday negotiations and realities of peace within rapidly urbanising spaces. This move positions urban peace as being constituted as a plurality of “peaces” that are continually negotiated, often partial, and inextricably linked to the territorialization of power rooted in hybrid governance systems involving state and non-state agents including traditional leaders, youth organizations, and vigilante groups. Expanding the analytical lens to non-postwar cities and sub-urban scales, the study provides a nuanced framework for understanding how localized protocols of governance produce both security and new forms of social discipline and exclusion that often rely upon a paradox of ‘peace as violence’.