Ifeanyi Onwuzuruigbo

Ifeanyi Onwuzuruigbo is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He holds a doctorate degree in Sociology and was Current Sociology’s ‘Sociologist of the Month’ in March 2019.

Currently, he is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Political Science and also affiliated to the Centre of Governance Innovation (GovInn) at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

His area of speciality is political and development sociology. However, his research interest straddles the nexus of security and development as well as peace and conflict studies.

Dr Onwuzuruigbo's fellowship years will be devoted to researching the phenomenal increase in herders/farmers conflicts in West Africa from the Nigerian perspective. In doing so, he will be interrogating extant laws, incipient regulations and policies deployed in managing and mitigating the conflicts.

What is more, other challenges hatched and thrown up by the conflicts – such as organized crime like cattle banditry, the unresolved land question, including the hotly contested discourse on autochthony and belonging - as well as attempts to deal with them will provide the tripod on which the study rests.

The ultimate aim, nevertheless, is to capture the ways in which these seemingly irresolvable questions and re-emerging but complicated phenomena impinge on the bioeconomy and food security in Nigeria.

Ifeanyi’s publications have appeared in Current Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Journal of Asian and African Studies and other reputable scholarly journals.