Coercion and Its Limits: Colonial Policing, Non-Coercive Improvisation, and the Origins of Hybrid Conflict Management in Nigeria's Middle Belt, 1920s–1960

Scholarship on colonial policing in Nigeria has focused primarily on how coercive instruments of the colonial state suppressed indigenous governance and entrenched racial hierarchies. This paper shifts the analytical lens from coercion as outcome to coercion as a structurally limited process. Drawing on provincial administrative records and Native Authority court documents from the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library, supported by oral interviews conducted in Plateau, Benue, and Nasarawa states between 2019 and 2021, the paper argues that colonial policing was the dominant but structurally deficient mode of conflict management in the region between the 1920s and independence in 1960. The Native Authority Police (NAP) and military patrols generated resistance, lacked community legitimacy, and were structurally incapable of penetrating inter-group conflicts at the rural community level. This coercive deficit compelled the colonial administration to develop non-coercive mechanisms, specifically administrative arbitration, traditional ruler mediation, and educated elite advocacy, as improvised responses to the limits of force. The paper argues that it was this improvisation, not deliberate hybrid governance design, that produced the tripartite conflict management architecture that postcolonial governments in the Middle Belt inherited. The colonial origins of that architecture have not been systematically traced. This paper supplies the genealogy