The Colonial Origins of Hybrid Conflict Management in Central Nigeria

The dominant hybridity literature locates hybrid conflict management as a response to the failures of liberal peacebuilding in post-Cold War states. This paper argues that this temporal framing misreads the nature of hybrid security arrangements in postcolonial Africa. Drawing on archival sources, oral interviews, and a historical research design covering Nigeria's Middle Belt from the 1920s to 2018, it makes a two-stage argument. First, the structural preconditions for hybrid conflict management were established in the 1920s and 1930s through British colonial governance, specifically the dual administration of emirate and non-emirate communities and the introduction of a Yan Doka force that was ethnically compromised and functionally inadequate for intergroup conflict. Second, these preconditions were institutionalised as a working hybrid architecture during the decolonisation decade of the late 1940s and 1950s, when the Macpherson Constitution, chieftaincy grading, and the strategic collaboration of educated elites with traditional rulers consolidated the tripartite conflict management structure that postcolonial governments inherited. Drawing on two independent empirical genealogies of hybrid governance in the same region, the paper further demonstrates that post-independence shocks deepened rather than created these arrangements and that women developed a fourth conflict management mode operating outside the official tripartite structure, a dimension the hybridity literature has not addressed. The paper connects these genealogies to the international hybridity debate, arguing that the field's temporal blind spot cannot be corrected without systematic engagement with African colonial administrative history