4 Peacebuilding, Fragility, Cattle Rustling, and Armed Banditry in Nigeria Chris M.A. Kwaja and Ephraim Bassey Emah Introduction Peacebuilding remains a complex venture that requires the framing of multiple activities that are linked and interdependent to ensure Just Peace. Some of such activities include peace education, restorative and transitional justice, devel- opment, conflict resolution (dialogue, mediation, and negotiation), trauma healing, multi-lateral and government efforts, and peacebuilding advocacy and solidarity, among other actions (Lederach & Mansfield, 2016). The challenge that peacebuilding faces in many societies, including countries like Sudan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Nigeria, transcends beyond narratives of weak interventions or insecurity. It is influenced, very often, by dilemmas that are embedded in relatively weak and dysfunctional social structures that increase opportunities for the protraction of violent conflicts and reverberation of pat- terns that exacerbate insecurity. It continues to remain evident that peacebuild- ing in many parts of Africa, including in Nigeria, is affected by state fragility and the weakness of institutions that have the mandate to develop and deliver of operational (short-term) and structural (long-term) preventive actions to institutionalize peace (Emah, 2019b; and Emah, 2019a). These challenges are further deepened by the emergence of complex security dynamics that immensely pressure the peace architecture of the state to constantly rethink its strategies. They also shrink the limited resources available for providing secu- rity, fracture inter-communal/intergroup relationships, and threaten economic prosperity and individual livelihoods, and collective opportunities, to attain integral human development. Fragility represents the inability of legitimate state authorities and structures to deliver basic services to citizens because of security and the challenges that it faces (Vallings & Moreno-Torres, 2005). In this sense, a state stands the risk of losing legitimacy when its responses and strategies to peacebuilding do not comprehensively address the prioritized needs of citizens. The problem that this chapter identifies is that the upswings in ideologies of rebellion, which are facilitated by didactic rhetoric that incites people, hold grave consequences for peacebuilding in Nigeria. Therefore, while phenomena like cattle rustling and armed banditry reveal the weaknesses in the security and peace architecture in DOI: 10.4324/9781003201953-5