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\"This collection explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa. The relevance of the focus on uncertainty in Africa is not only that contemporary life is objectively risky and unpredictable (since it is so everywhere and in every period), but that uncertainty has become a dominant trope in the subjective experience of life in contemporary African societies. The contributors investigate how uncertainty animates people's ways of knowing and being across the continent. An introduction and eight ethnographic studies examine uncertainty as a social resource that can be used to negotiate insecurity, conduct and create relationships, and act as a source for imagining the future. These in-depth accounts demonstrate that uncertainty does not exist as an autonomous, external condition. Rather, uncertainty is entwined with social relations and shapes people's relationship between the present and the future. By foregrounding uncertainty, this volume advances our understandings of the contingency of practice, both socially and temporally\"-- Provided by publisher.

Vigilantism has become an endemic feature of the Nigerian social and political landscape. The emergence of night guards and vigilante groups as popular responses to theft and armed robbery has a long and varied history in Nigeria. Since the return to democracy in 1999, however, Nigeria has witnessed a proliferation of vigilantism: vigilante groups have organized at a variety of levels from lineage to ethnic group, in a variety of locations from village ward to city street, and for a variety of reasons from crime fighting to political lobbying. Indeed, vigilantism has captured such a range of local, national and international dynamics that it provides a sharply focused lens for students of Nigeria's political economy and its most intractable issues � the politics of democracy, ethnicity and religion. Contemporary Nigerian vigilantism concerns a range of local and global dynamics beyond informal justice.

Contemporary Nigerian vigilantism concerns a range of local and global dynamics beyond informal justice. It is a lens on the politics of post-colonial Africa, on the current political economy of Nigeria, and on its most intractable issues – the politics of democracy, ethnicity and religion. The legitimation of vigilante activity has extended beyond dissatisfaction with current levels of law and order and the failings of the Nigeria Police. To understand the local legitimacy of vigilantism in post-colonial Nigeria, indeed, it is also necessary to recognize its internal imperatives. Vigilantism in this context is embedded in narratives of contested rights, in familiar everyday practices, understandings of personhood and knowledge, and in alternative, older registers of governmentality. In addition to mapping temporal and spatial communities in which young men are vested with the right to exercise justice, this article assesses the legitimacy of Annang vigilantism within cultural frameworks of accountability linked to conceptions of agency, personhood and power, and the oppositions this produces between vigilantes and thieves. Le vigilantisme nigérian contemporain concerne un ensemble de dynamiques locales et globales au-delà de la justice informelle. Il offre une perspective de la politique de l'Afrique post-coloniale, de l'économie politique actuelle du Nigeria et de ses problèmes les plus ardus, à savoir la politique de la démocratie, de l'ethnicité et de la religion. La légitimation de l'activité des vigilantes a dépassé le cadre du mécontentement vis-à-vis du niveau actuel de maintien de l'ordre et des défaillances de la police nigériane. Pour comprendre la légitimité locale du vigilantisme dans le Nigeria post-colonial, il faut en effet éalement reconnaître ses impératifs internes. Le vigilantisme, dans ce contexte, s'inscrit dans des narratifs de droits contestés, dans des pratiques quotidiennes familières, dans des interprétations de la notion de personne et de savoir, ainsi que dans d'autres registres plus anciens de gouvernementalité. Outre le mappage des communautés temporelles et spatiales au sein desquelles les hommes jeunes sont investis du droit d'exercer la justice, cet article évalue la légitimité du vigilantisme annang dans des cadres de responsabilité culturels liés à l'action, à la personne et au pouvoir, ainsi que les oppositions que cette légitimité engendre entre les vigilantes et les voleurs.

This article looks at four cases of youth‐led identity‐based social movements in Benin City and in the Annang area of southern Nigeria. It shows how each of these movements — youth associations, ‘area boys’, vigilantes and campus cults — draws on different, older repertoires of discourse and organization, and enters into relations with state authority that combine elements of complicity, insurgency, monitoring and disengagement. It argues that their activities, mobilized around resource control and community security, can be understood as a response to the Nigerian ‘politics of plunder’, endemic since the beginning of the oil boom, but locally perceived as having intensified from the 1990s onwards.

In the postcolonial context of \"metaphysical disorder\" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006) and \"radical uncertainty\" (Mbembe 2004), the verification of knowledge by means that are beyond human agency, the reconfiguration of others as abject nonhumans, and the re-making of selves out of the secrets of the supernatural are familiar and effective frameworks in the quest for order and certainty. The most well-known examples of the initiatory societies of these communities are ékpë, the leopard society (Ruel 1969, Leib and Romano 1984, Ottenberg and Knudsen 1985; on the ékpë society's trans- Atlantic connections see Palmié 2006), awtè òwò, the warrior society (Salmons 1985), the married women's society, èbrè or nyàamà (Jeffreys 1956), and the èkón masquerade, which comprises a number of dramatic performances, including puppetry, costumed acting, and acrobatics (Jeffreys 1951, Messenger 1962, Scheinberg 1977, Ebong Inih 1990).

Vigilantism has become an endemic feature of the Nigerian social and political landscape. The emergence of night guards and vigilante groups as popular responses to theft and armed robbery has a long and varied history in Nigeria. Since the return to democracy in 1999, however, Nigeria has witnessed a proliferation of vigilantism: vigilante groups have organized at a variety of levels from lineage to ethnic group, in a variety of locations from village ward to city street, and for a variety of reasons from crime fighting to political lobbying. Indeed, vigilantism has captured such a range of local, national and international dynamics that it provides a sharply focused lens for students of Nigeria's political economy and its most intractable issues – the politics of democracy, ethnicity and religion. Contemporary Nigerian vigilantism concerns a range of local and global dynamics beyond informal justice.