Communal conflicts in the context of the religious landscape transformation (case study of Nigeria)

The article attempts to define spatial mechanisms of emerging conflicts in the context of the transformation of Nigeria's religious landscape. To implement the task, the authors propose a methodology to determine vectors and trends in the transformation of geo-spaces of the country's largest religions (Christianity, Islam and Ethnic religions) within the administrative territorial units of Nigeria. The methodology combines the Ryabtsev index of territorial structure shifts, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, the dynamics of the share of a certain faith group in population, and the rate and trajectory of the shift of their demographic centers within the country. The results were correlated with the spatial pattern of conflicts location. The conflicts were further analyzed considering their main actors, scale (average number of casualties per conflict) and brutality (share of casualties of a conflict). It was found that the expansion of Christianity and Islam geospaces, primarily at the expense of Ethnic religions geospace, led to the formation of a diagonally elongated belt of states that divides Nigeria into predominantly Christian southeast and predominantly Muslim north. The polarized territorial structure of Nigeria's religious landscape combined with pronounced socio-economic imbalances between the southern and northern states resulted in the growing conflict potential of the country. It is empirically found that the severity of conflicts in Nigeria increases towards the northeast of the country, i.e. along the expansion vector of Christianity geo-space. The authors interpret the discovered pattern as a response of Islam geo-space which is replaced by Christianity being more effective in terms of its missionary activity. The most active subjects of conflicts, in particular the «Boko Haram» terrorist group (banned in Russia), have emerged in the historical core of Islam in Nigeria rather than in the zone of direct interaction of world religions. The available data suggest that the faster the religious landscape of Nigeria's states transforms, the higher the scale and severity of conflicts.

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