Civil Society in the shadows of Nigeria’s Core Conflicts Civil Society and Nigeria’s Core Conflict: Rural Banditry Chris M. A. KWAJA, PhD Introduction The current security challenge in Nigeria as evident in the frequency, intensity and fatalities associated with organized crimes in the rural space of Nigeria, popularly referred to as rural banditry(Kuna& Ibrahim, 2015), has drawn the attention of academics and policymakers. One of the worse impacts of this rising and complex security challenge lies in the deaths, dispossession, displacement of people from their places of abode and sources of livelihoods. Across many of the states where the phenomenon of banditry thrives, the bandits took over forests and transformed them into highly militarized and securitized zones (Okoli& Ochim, 2016). This phenomenon of rural banditry has become a dominant feature of the Northwest region, which encompasses Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara, with the states of Kaduna, Katsina and Zamfara been the hot beds(Okoli and Ugwu, 2019). Outside the Northwest region, communities in states such as Adamawa and Taraba in the Northeast region, as well as Benue and Plateau in the North Central region have witnessed series of deadly attacks by organized criminal groups. No state wants to be defined as fragile in the context of state capacity to either protect or provide. The reality is that while the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Nigeria| 92