Who are the displaced? Historical and socio-cultural context

Displacement is a global human security crisis, typically categorized into two groups of people: refugees and IDPs. While refugees cross international borders and are protected under international law, IDPs remain within their countries of origin, often relying on the same state institutions implicated in their displacement (Cohen and Deng Reference Cohen and Deng1998; UNHCR 2024). This article focuses on IDPs in Benue State, Nigeria – individuals uprooted by violent conflict yet confined within national boundaries. Their struggles unfold in camps characterized by precarious conditions, institutional neglect and uneven humanitarian response (Ekezie Reference Ekezie2022).

The majority of IDPs in the Naka, Daudu II and Abagana camps are of Tiv ethnicity, one of the dominant ethnolinguistic groups in Nigeria’s North Central; they are predominantly Christians (Catholics, Pentecostals or members of African independent churches) and adherents of African indigenous religion. Traditionally agrarian, the Tiv people maintain deep ancestral ties to land, engaging in subsistence farming, small-scale trading and artisanal crafts (Nyagba Reference Nyagba and Denga1995; Makar Reference Makar1994). For the Tiv, land transcends its economic value, constituting the core of cultural identity, spiritual beliefs and communal order (Aule Reference Aule2015). Displacement, therefore, is not merely a loss of shelter but a rupture in cosmological and socio-cultural continuity – an erosion of the rhythms of life rooted in kinship, memory and territory. The crisis finds its origins in Nigeria’s protracted farmer–herder conflict, which has intensified since 2014 due to environmental degradation, arms proliferation, population pressures and the weakening of traditional conflict resolution systems (International Crisis Group 2017; Kwaja and Smith Reference Kwaja and Smith2020). In response, the Benue State government enacted the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law in 2017. While aimed at regulating land use, the law fuelled retaliatory attacks by armed pastoralist groups, escalating violence in Guma, Gwer West, Logo, Makurdi and Agatu local government areas (Okoli and Nnaemeka Reference Okoli and Nnaemeka2020).

Between 2015 and 2024, Fulani herdsmen have coordinated assaults on villages, have targeted killings, and have displaced over two million people in Benue State (BSEMA 2024). The state’s response – focused on militarized security deployments – has prioritized containment over civilian protection or recovery, leaving displaced populations with limited access to justice or restitution (Okoli and Ugwu Reference Okoli and Ugwu2019; Olaniyan and Okeke-Uzodike Reference Olaniyan and Okeke-Uzodike2020). The forced removal from ancestral land has dismantled longstanding clan systems, disrupted ritual practices, and fragmented the social fabric that once structured everyday life. Many now experience deep ontological dislocation – an uprooting not just from place but from meaning (Kwaja and Ademola-Adelehin Reference Kwaja and Ademola-Adelehin2018; Iorbo et al. Reference Iorbo, Sahni, Bhatnagar and Andzenge2024).

Life in the camps remains fragile. Humanitarian assistance is inconsistent and chronically underfunded. Until 2023, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) supported health interventions in Daudu II and Abagana (MSF 2023). Following their departure, organizations such as UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) have offered minimal maternal and psychosocial support, constrained by logistical and funding challenges (MSF 2024).Footnote ¹ National agencies such as the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and Benue State Emergency Management Agency (BSEMA) remain reactive and overstretched. In contrast, faith-based groups such as the Foundation for Justice Development and Peace (FJDP) and local churches continue to provide vital assistance, including food distribution, shelter and informal education (Albert and Abah Reference Albert and Abah2024).

Yet survival in these camps is not wholly dependent on external actors. Displaced communities have developed self-organized systems of leadership, food sharing, conflict resolution and local governance. These informal structures often outperform bureaucratic mechanisms in addressing the needs of camp residents. Over time, the camps have begun to function as emergent urban spaces – sites marked by improvisation, resilience and mutual care. In this way, displacement is not merely endured; it is actively inhabited and reconfigured through social innovation and collective labour. This aligns with Simone’s (Reference Simone2004) notion of people as infrastructure – the ability of marginalized populations to forge survival and continuity through everyday acts of solidarity, negotiation and improvisation.

Precarity as infrastructure, displacement and everyday governance

Recent scholarship on precarity and informal infrastructures has moved beyond viewing displaced populations as passive victims. Global theorists such as Butler (Reference Butler2009) and Waite (Reference Waite2009) conceptualize precarity not merely as material lack, but as a mode of governance that regulates life through vulnerability and disposability. Building on these foundations scholars – including Meagher (Reference Meagher2010), Watson (Reference Watson2014) and Choonara et al. (Reference Choonara, Murgia and Carmo2022) – have developed grounded accounts of how precarity is negotiated through everyday improvisation, social resilience and informal governance. In contexts of state absence, marginalized groups mobilize networks of kinship, faith and mutual aid as infrastructures of survival and care.

The concept of people as infrastructure, introduced by AbdouMaliq Simone (Reference Simone2004) and expanded by Julia Elyachar (Reference Elyachar2010), shows how populations in the global South generate alternative urban systems through informal coordination, collective agency and social capital. Practices such as informal trade, spiritual solidarities and self-help housing act as substitutes for formal infrastructure, particularly in African cities marked by uneven development and state neglect. As Oldfield (Reference Oldfield2015) and Meagher (Reference Meagher2010) argue, these systems not only fill governance gaps but actively reshape political and spatial orders. In displacement studies, scholars such as Sanyal (Reference Sanyal2014) and Pallister-Wilkins (Reference Pallister-Wilkins, Günay and Witjes2018) highlight how camps, typically seen as temporary humanitarian spaces, are sustained by dynamic informal infrastructures that reconfigure authority, space and resistance from below.

In Nigeria, these dynamics are especially pronounced. Protracted internal displacement – driven by ethno-political conflict, land disputes and violence – has created new spatial and social formations, particularly in the Middle Belt. In Benue State, the state’s failure has left IDPs to organize life through informal governance. Aande et al. (Reference Aande, Gbande and Iember2019) describe displacement as a protracted condition managed through securitization, ad hoc humanitarianism and local improvisation. Studies by Aande and Gbande (Reference Aande and Gbande2025) and Albert and Abah (Reference Albert and Abah2024) show how IDPs form complex solidarities – rooted in religion, ethnicity and informal economies – to govern camp life and allocate resources in the absence of consistent state support.

However, these insights – especially those by Simone, Elyachar, Meagher, Sanyal and Pallister-Wilkins – are more often applied to urban refugees than to internally displaced populations in rural or hybrid African contexts. Nigerian literature also has largely focused on psychosocial trauma, humanitarian gaps and state failure, with insufficient attention to the everyday vernacular infrastructures birthed by IDPs amid precarity. This article addresses these silences by showing how informal infrastructures, waiting and securitization intersect in Benue’s rural camps. Rethinking IDP camps as spaces of ‘urban governance from below’, it extends critical theories of displacement, precarity and informality into neglected rural terrains.

Theoretical framework: precarity, people, and the politics of improvised life

Displacement in Benue State does not occur in a vacuum; it unfolds against absent governance, frayed kinship networks and the long-term erosion of state legitimacy. Yet, in this void, life does not grind to a halt. Across sites such as Daudu II, Abagana and Naka, displaced persons remake the ordinary – not as a return to normalcy, but as a means of enduring crisis through innovation, collective labour and social obligation. This study draws on the lived infrastructures fashioned by IDPs themselves, positioning their improvisational survival as a central analytic – not as mere coping, but as a distinct form of governance (Simone Reference Simone2004; Elyachar Reference Elyachar2010; Wilson and Jonas Reference Wilson and Jonas2021).

In Benue, the camp is not solely a site of suffering or humanitarian presence; it is a space where people themselves become the conduits for resource flow, decision making and care. From informal leadership structures to communal food sharing and makeshift clinics, displaced persons organize life in ways that replicate, adapt or entirely supplant state functions. These are not incidental reactions; they are socially embedded infrastructures enacted through relational ties, historical memory and the politics of everyday survival (Lancione Reference Lancione2019; Davies Reference Davies2019). As one elder in Naka remarked: ‘We don’t wait for Abuja to feed us. If your brother has [food or something], you eat. If not, you keep looking.’ This kind of interdependence is not merely a cultural value: it is infrastructural. It reveals how people materialize systems of provision, regulation and repair using what remains: relationships, memory, faith and labour. These networks, often invisible to humanitarian actors, are patterned, enduring and generative (Meagher Reference Meagher2010; Kihato Reference Kihato2013).

Simultaneously, this article attends to the spatial and political transformation of the camp itself. Though conceived as temporary and exceptional, IDP camps in Benue have come to exhibit characteristics of urban peripheries – with dense informal economies, spatial ordering, emergent governance systems and social stratification. Scholars such as Agier (Reference Agier2002), Jansen (Reference Jansen2011) and Sanyal (Reference Sanyal2014) have conceptualized such spaces as camp-cities, where protracted displacement blurs the boundaries between crisis response and urban formation. In Benue, camps are not sealed humanitarian enclaves. They are porous, entangled with surrounding towns, and marked by flows of movement, negotiation and contestation (Pallister-Wilkins Reference Pallister-Wilkins, Günay and Witjes2018). As one youth in Abagana observed: ‘This is not just a camp. We trade here, we fight here, we live here. It is our town now, even if they call it temporary.’ Together, these lenses – people as infrastructure and camps as urban space – offer a coherent framework for understanding precarity not merely as absence or lack, but as a productive, if painful, condition through which displaced persons generate new social, political and spatial arrangements. Governance, in this framing, is not a matter of institutional presence alone. It is embedded in everyday circular governance, evidenced in how people share, shelter, dispute and endure.

Infrastructure from below: doing ethnography in Nigeria’s displacement camps

This article draws on ethnographic methods to explore how IDPs in Benue State, Nigeria, navigate protracted displacement through informal infrastructures of survival, governance and care. Ethnography here is understood not merely as a technique, but as a mode of attentiveness, a commitment to daily presence, relational engagement, and thick description of how displacement is lived, negotiated and made endurable in the absence of formal state protection (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh Reference Fiddian-Qasmiyeh2016; Sanyal Reference Sanyal2014). Between July and December 2024, I conducted six months of fieldwork across three major IDP camps: Naka, Daudu II and Abagana. While this study focuses on six months of intensive fieldwork, it also builds on a prolonged engagement of twenty-four months. The period marked my doctoral field research (January 2023–December 2024) in Benue State. Insights from earlier immersion helped shape access strategies, relational currency, language competence and thematic focus. These camps – among the twenty-seven officially recognized in the state – were selected based on scale, longevity and governance complexity. According to BSEMA (2024), these sites collectively hosted just over 21,000 persons. While this represents a fraction of the state’s estimated two million displaced people, the chosen camps exhibited dense institutional entanglements and layered social dynamics that offered fertile ground for understanding everyday governance from below.

Fieldwork intensity varied by site, reflecting both research access and internal camp dynamics. In Naka, where I spent eleven weeks, a hybrid leadership structure involving displaced persons, clergy and security actors necessitated extended immersion to trace how power and authority were negotiated (Pallister-Wilkins Reference Pallister-Wilkins, Günay and Witjes2018). In Daudu II, where I spent nine weeks, humanitarian presence was intense and visible, with multiple NGOs operating in overlapping domains. This created a crowded governance terrain in which IDPs continually manoeuvred between competing sources of aid, surveillance and legitimacy. Abagana, where I spent six weeks, had more restricted access due to local gatekeeping, but offered a contrasting rhythm and revealed ethics of care and communal coping strategies often obscured in more institutionally saturated settings.

Participant observation was central to the study. I spent most days embedded in communal spaces – queues for food and water, prayer meetings, school grounds (voluntary teaching), clinics, informal markets – observing how routines, obligations and contestations unfolded in these seemingly mundane settings. These sites became key entry points for understanding not just survival tactics but broader questions of authority, belonging and moral community (Butler Reference Butler2009). Participant recruitment was purposive and snowball-based. Initial entry was facilitated by camp leaders and NGO focal persons, who introduced me to key informants across gender, age and social status. Through these relationships, I conducted forty interviews with displaced persons, volunteer caregivers, youth leaders, humanitarian actors and local officials. Conversations took both formal and informal forms, some structured and recorded, others unfolding spontaneously during long waits, shared meals or evening gatherings. Interviews were conducted in English or Tiv depending on context, with later translation and transcription where necessary. These encounters formed the heart of the research, providing narrative and affective texture that anchored later analysis (Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2010; Meagher Reference Meagher2010).

Ethical procedures were strictly observed. Approval was secured from the University of Ibadan Research Ethics Committee and formal permissions obtained from BSEMA. Participants gave informed consent, and identities have been anonymized. Yet ethical responsibility went beyond procedural compliance. Many participants had experienced profound loss. Navigating their stories demanded sensitivity, trust building and reflexivity. As a Nigerian scholar from outside the directly affected communities, I occupied a dual position – culturally proximate yet institutionally distanced – which required ongoing attentiveness to power, expectation and voice (Waite Reference Waite2009; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh Reference Fiddian-Qasmiyeh2016).

Data analysis was iterative and inductive, drawing on fieldnotes, interview transcripts and relevant policy documents. Using thematic analysis, I identified recurrent patterns and emergent themes, moving between empirical fragments and conceptual frameworks. The theoretical framing – particularly the idea of precarity as infrastructure – emerged from the field itself: in the observed food-sharing systems, parallel leadership arrangements and communal strategies of care. I followed scholars such as Simone (Reference Simone2004), Elyachar (Reference Elyachar2010) and Zetter (Reference Zetter2022) in tracing how displaced persons retool fragments of humanitarian and social infrastructure into forms of urban governance from below. Together, these layers of engagement enabled a deeper understanding of displacement, not merely as crisis but as an active, situated process of negotiation, improvisation and endurance.

Survival in neglect: the construction of informal infrastructures by IDPs in Benue State, Nigeria

Based on sustained ethnographic immersion in three camps – Abagana, Daudu II and Naka – this section presents findings across various themes. First, it explores how displaced persons improvise routines and reshape communal space to sustain everyday life. Second, it examines kinship, faith and solidarity as infrastructures of care. Third, it details how IDPs navigate authority and aid in conditions of exclusion. Fourth, it interprets waiting as strategic and political. Finally, it argues that camps embody urban governance from below – informal, relational and inventive. These findings recast displacement not merely as loss, but as a site of social reordering and infrastructural creativity.

Faith-based structures and symbolic resilience

In the absence of sustained state presence or formal psychosocial care, religious life has become a central infrastructure of survival in the IDP camps. Churches – particularly Pentecostal, evangelical and Catholic congregations – have emerged as both symbolic anchors and operational actors. They host prayer services, distribute donated goods, offer emotional support, and create spaces for mourning, joy and collective healing. In doing so, they serve as relational infrastructures – networks based on affect, trust and ritual that hold communities together amid fragmentation. In Naka camp, Pastor Ternenge, a displaced Pentecostal leader from Gwer West, described his role as ‘keeping hope from dying when food and shelter fail’. His tented church, constructed from wood and nylon sheets, hosted daily evening prayers and occasional vigils. ‘People come here not because they are righteous,’ he explained. ‘They come because it is the only place where they don’t feel forgotten.’ Esther, a nineteen-year-old survivor of sexual violence, echoed this sentiment: ‘When I cry, it is not just for hunger. It is because I see no future. But church gives me reasons to wake up. They prayed for me when I couldn’t even speak.’ Her testimony illustrates how prayer and ritual can become technologies of survival – not merely for spiritual reassurance, but as modes of psychosocial repair. At Abagana camp, the Catholic women’s fellowship organizes biweekly outreach, sharing food donations and counselling services. One of their coordinators, Mama Roseline, a retired nurse now displaced herself, said: ‘We use prayer to keep our minds, but we also use our hands. When someone loses a child or is attacked, we gather, we pray, we cook, we sit with them.’ This combination of sacrament and service reflects the multiple functions religious institutions assume in camp life: they are caregivers, moral authorities, informal counsellors and mediators.

Youth are not absent from these spaces. At Daudu II, a group of teenagers formed a gospel music group called Voices of Grace, performing weekly during fellowship sessions. ‘We sing to remind ourselves that God still sees us,’ said Torkuma, the lead singer. ‘Even if government forgets us, God doesn’t.’ Their songs – composed in Tiv and English – speak of exile, faith and endurance, reinforcing a shared narrative of survival and spiritual dignity. These churches also serve as sites of symbolic governance. Disputes over stolen items, accusations of infidelity and inter-family tensions are often brought before pastors or elders rather than camp officials or humanitarian actors. ‘When there’s a problem, I don’t go to the camp chairman,’ said Veronica, a widowed mother of three in Ichwa. ‘I go to my church elder. He prays first, then calls the two people to talk. It works better that way.’ This informal arbitration reinforces the centrality of religious figures in shaping moral order and everyday governance. Importantly, religious institutions provide a language to make sense of suffering without collapsing into despair. As one elderly man in Naka reflected: ‘We lost our farms, our homes, our people. But we did not lose God. That is how we stand.’ Here, faith functions not as an opiate, but as a means of preserving social coherence and narrative continuity in a world rendered unstable. Even among those who had not been deeply religious before displacement, participation in camp-based religious life became a form of belonging. ‘Back in our village, I didn’t go to church much,’ confessed Terseer, a young man from Daudu II. ‘But here, it is different. Church is where you see people. You talk, you share, it feels like family.’

In all three camps, these religious spaces are not peripheral: they are infrastructural. They organize emotional labour, distribute scarce resources, adjudicate conflicts and offer a frame for interpreting suffering. In this way, churches do more than respond to crisis; they actively shape the social architecture of displacement. As Mama Roseline concluded during one of our final interviews: ‘If the church was not here, many people would have gone mad. The body may be in the camp, but it is faith that keeps the soul alive.’

Markets, informal economies and gendered labour

Economic activity within the camps, though modest and often precarious, remains vital to daily survival. These informal economies are largely driven by women, who shoulder the responsibility of feeding households and sustaining camp life. Their activities – including the sale of cooked maize, firewood, sachet water, condiments and handmade soap – form what may be termed gendered infrastructures of survival, structured by care work, risk and mobility in the absence of formal employment or government support. ‘Every morning, I wake before dawn to boil maize and beans,’ said Mngohol, a forty-two-year-old mother of five in Daudu II. ‘My children eat what remains. I sell the rest in small plastic bowls at the gate. It is this maize that buys soap, salt, even paracetamol.’ Her voice, firm yet tired, reflects the routinization of hardship that defines economic life in the camps. For many like her, earning a living means braving danger and uncertainty daily.

In Abagana, the search for firewood is a central activity among displaced women, yet it exposes them to significant danger. ‘The bush is where we get what we sell,’ explained Dooshima, a teenage girl who fled armed attacks in Gwer West. ‘But sometimes, we hear gunshots. Some girls don’t come back with all their clothes. We know what that means.’ Despite these dangers, the firewood trade continues because it is one of the few accessible and immediate sources of income. Women often travel in groups to minimize risk, and some have developed informal warning systems, like whistling or mobile alerts, when danger arises.

Markets within the camps function as more than sites of exchange. They are spaces of negotiation, resilience and social organization. In Daudu II, a group of displaced youth – mostly young men from Logo and Guma local government areas – initiated the building of a market cluster using discarded zinc, bamboo sticks and plastic sheeting. ‘We were tired of buying things outside the camp at high prices,’ said Tersoo, one of the youth leaders. ‘So, we marked out space beside the clinic and started constructing stalls. We called it “our junction”.’ This improvised market not only facilitated access to basic goods but also created a communal space where displaced people could socialize, exchange news and assert control over their environment.

Importantly, this market development led to new forms of governance. ‘If you want to sell, you must join the security,’ explained Monday, a young volunteer. ‘Each night, we rotate patrols to prevent stealing or fights. Nobody forced us – we just knew we had to protect our own.’ These accounts illustrate forms of bottom-up organization and mutual accountability that echo Beeckmans’ (Reference Beeckmans2025) notion of ‘mobile urbanism from below’, where everyday practices by marginalized groups (such as migrants) actively constitute – rather than merely inhabit – urban infrastructures. I extend this concept to IDP camps and rural peripheries in Nigeria, where infrastructures of survival are forged not through urban heterogeneity but through necessity, vulnerability and moral obligation – anchoring displaced communities in a paradoxical condition of being part of the city without being in it, and surviving without it. In this way, displaced communities transform space, create rules and regulate daily life in the absence of state structures. Here, gender dynamics are crucial. While men often dominate physically demanding tasks – such as construction, transportation and security – women’s labour is especially visible in the trade of consumables and caregiving-related goods. ‘When we started, the men were laughing – “You and your pepper and onions,” they said,’ recalled Veronica, a single mother in Ichwa. ‘But now, even their wives come to buy from us. Some of them ask if we can teach their daughters.’ This resonates with Elyachar’s (Reference Elyachar2010) observations in Cairo, where women’s seemingly minor transactions and everyday conversations generated ‘communicative channels’ that circulated not only goods but also semiotic meanings and social obligations. Just as in Cairo, this phatic labour has created infrastructures later mobilized for profit; in Benue it underpins emergent markets, sustains trust and transmits knowledge across kin and gendered networks. Women’s roles, often dismissed as marginal, thus reveal themselves as central to the infrastructures of survival.

Through such everyday acts, displaced women assert economic agency and redefine their roles beyond domestic confines. In Ichwa, however, economic organization remains more dispersed and less structured. ‘There’s no space like a market here,’ noted Rhoda, a fifty-year-old grandmother selling used slippers. ‘You just find a corner where the soldiers won’t drive you away.’ The lack of a formal market limits economic possibilities but also reflects broader constraints imposed by humanitarian actors and security agents. ‘Sometimes the NGO people say we are congesting the area or making noise,’ Rhoda continued. ‘But when we stop, who will feed us?’ Despite these challenges, the informal economies in Benue’s IDP camps demonstrate how displacement reorganizes everyday life. They show how displaced persons – not as passive recipients but as active social agents – build infrastructures of survival from the ground up.

Kinship, youth and community order

Extended kin networks function as moral economies, particularly for unaccompanied children, widows or the elderly. In Gwer West’s Ichwa camp, community elders run informal dispute resolution councils that handle domestic conflicts and thefts. Youths, meanwhile, form vigilante groups that patrol at night with flashlights and sticks. One youth leader noted: ‘We cannot wait for the police. They only come after a crime. We prevent it ourselves.’ These mechanisms blend protection, justice and symbolic authority in ways that mimic state functions. They underscore how displaced populations mobilize not just resources, but also social imaginaries of order, responsibility and futurity.

The density and effectiveness of these survival networks vary across camps, shaped by geography, social composition and external engagement. In Naka, where Pentecostal and Catholic groups are deeply embedded, and informal markets flourish with some support from local traders, mutual aid systems are relatively cohesive and vibrant. In contrast, Daudu II has witnessed fraying communal trust, particularly around aid distribution, yet youth-led initiatives – such as security patrols and informal dispute mediation – continue to sustain a fragile sense of order. Meanwhile, Abagana, situated on the peri-urban fringe of Makurdi, benefits from sporadic outreach by civil society actors and faith-based organizations, but suffers from acute overcrowding, poor drainage, and rising tensions over space and resource sharing. These contrasts underscore that ‘survival’ is not uniformly distributed, even among the displaced.

Survival in Benue’s displacement camps is not merely about endurance; it is about the improvisation of relational infrastructures in the absence of formal state systems. Kinship, religious devotion, informal exchange and youth-led organization collectively form a flexible but essential architecture of everyday governance. These networks illustrate Simone’s (Reference Simone2004) argument that people themselves become the infrastructure, not through grand design but through situated, collective ingenuity. Rather than passive recipients of humanitarian intervention, IDPs emerge here as infrastructural actors – assembling systems of care, order and circulation from the margins. Yet, as the contrasts across Naka, Daudu II and Abagana suggest, such infrastructures are uneven – fragile in places, adaptive in others – shaped by camp histories, social ecologies and external neglect. While these networks of survival sustain everyday life, they also draw IDPs into constant negotiation with overlapping – and often absent – forms of authority, from camp leaders to NGOs and state actors. These encounters are rarely straightforward; they are shaped by asymmetries of power, contested legitimacy and everyday strategies of compliance and resistance, as we will see in the next section.

Negotiating aid and authority: power, absence and resistance

While humanitarian agencies and government bodies are formally charged with coordinating relief in Benue State’s displacement camps, their actual presence is fragmented, episodic and often perceived by IDPs as coercive, symbolic or politically performative. What emerges instead is a layered field of competing authorities – government agencies, NGOs, religious organizations, traditional rulers and self-appointed leaders – all vying to fill the vacuum left by a retreating state. These fragmented sovereignties, often opaque and unaccountable, become the terrain on which governance is negotiated from below. As Sarah, a forty-two-year-old mother of five in Abagana camp, noted: ‘They [the government] only come when there’s news cameras or when someone important is visiting. Then they disappear again.’

IDPs often described official interventions as poor, mostly inadequate, brief and strategically timed. Agencies such as BSEMA and NEMA were commonly associated with selective distributions – bags of rice, beans and occasional hygiene kits – that often arrived without prior consultation or needs assessment. These forms of ‘tokenistic’ aid reinforced the sense that governance, like the relief itself, was more spectacle than substance. But the state’s retreat does not equate to a governance vacuum. Rather, it creates a plural and contested political space, where new and old actors assert authority, legitimacy and control over people, resources and narratives. In Daudu II, for example, international NGOs such as MSF and local faith-based organizations like the Justice Development and Peace Commission (JDPC) initially coordinated healthcare and shelter. However, MSF’s withdrawal in 2023 triggered what camp residents described as a ‘governance crisis’, leading to disjointed interventions by UNICEF and WHO and deepening uncertainty over who was responsible for basic services. ‘When MSF left, everything fell apart. The small clinic now depends on luck – if UNICEF or WHO remembers us,’ explained Terkimbi, a twenty-eight-year-old volunteer health worker in Daudu II.

In Naka, religious institutions – particularly Pentecostal churches – have assumed significant authority, not only organizing aid but mediating disputes and shaping behavioural norms. Here, pastors often function as spiritual leaders, moral arbiters and logistical coordinators. Yet this consolidation of power also produces exclusionary dynamics. According to Terna, a forty-five-year-old displaced farmer from Gwer West, ‘If you are not a member of their church, forget it. They will not call your name when food comes.’

In Abagana, traditional rulers and camp chairpersons – some installed by local officials, others emerging through internal elections – mediate access to shelter, NGO personnel and space. Their legitimacy is uneven. Some are respected as community anchors; others face allegations of favouritism, mismanagement or rent seeking. These leaders operate at the intersection of formal and informal power, again performing what Elyachar (Reference Elyachar2010: 453) calls phatic labour. Elyachar’s Cairo ethnography showed that so-called empowerment projects did not transform women’s lives directly, but instead drew upon and instrumentalized their existing social practices and networks. The true source of empowerment lay in these women’s ability to sustain social infrastructures through everyday relational work.

A similar dynamic is evident in Benue’s IDP camps. Despite the formal economies of aid directed by NGOs and state agencies, it is the dense webs of camp leadership and social networks that form the backbone of survival. As Mnena, a thirty-one-year-old single mother in Daudu II, explained: ‘They know how to talk to politicians and NGOs. That’s why they remain in charge. But they only call their people when help comes.’ What emerges is a complex social infrastructure of negotiation, where knowing whom to approach, when to queue, or when to remain silent becomes integral to survival. Across the camps, IDPs enact a micropolitics of engagement – selectively participating in NGO surveys, staging visibility when officials arrive, or withholding speech as a form of quiet resistance when they perceive injustice. As Jansen (Reference Jansen2011: 156) shows in Kakuma, refugees sometimes claimed political space through organizing – most notably in the formation of workers’ unions. At the same time, Agier (Reference Agier2002: 337) provocatively asks why the camp may take shape as an urbs (a space of urban sociability) yet rarely as a polis (a recognized political community). In Benue, practices such as orderly queuing for cameras, strategic withholding and coordinated complaints operate as tactical claims to recognition: ‘If we don’t line up when the cameras come, nothing comes,’ as one resident put it. These acts generate an urbs of everyday sociability without a guaranteed translation into a polis. Such patterned interactions constitute fragile infrastructures of survival and mutual accountability, yet the shift from social presence to political recognition remains partial and contested.

The dynamics of authority vary across camps. In Naka, amid inchoate activity by government and humanitarian actors, strong religious institutions have created relatively stable, morally governed systems of aid distribution, though often tinged with sectarian favouritism. Daudu II, by contrast, suffers from volatile aid flows and intense distrust among residents, particularly after MSF’s withdrawal. Here, youth-led patrols have emerged to fill security gaps, while informal councils attempt to adjudicate disputes. Abagana, with its proximity to Makurdi, is intermittently visible to urban civil society actors and politicians, yet its residents describe aid as seasonal and performative, coinciding with electoral cycles or media coverage. These camps do not represent a total collapse of governance but rather a reconfiguration – an improvised choreography of actors, institutions and tactics operating in the shadow of the state. Survival here depends not only on access to food or shelter but on mastery of social scripts, alliances and the symbolic politics of visibility. IDPs emerge not as helpless victims but as infrastructural actors – simultaneously navigating, contesting and reproducing authority in ways that mirror broader patterns of urban governance in contexts of chronic crisis. In this sense, governance is not absent but dispersed – and the displaced are not just recipients of rule but co-constructors of political life within the camp as urban space. As such, the Benue displacement camps illustrate how people become infrastructure, sustaining not only daily life but also the very structures of accountability, resistance and authority that formal institutions have abandoned.

While negotiation with humanitarian and state authorities reveals the tenuous nature of governance in displacement, it also exposes another central dynamic: waiting. Beyond active improvisation and contestation, life in the camps is marked by suspended time – of promises deferred, aid delayed and futures postponed. Waiting is not merely passive; it is patterned, managed and endured. It shapes how IDPs relate to institutions, imagine return and recalibrate hope. In what follows, we turn to this temporal dimension of displacement to examine how waiting becomes both a burden and a site of quiet endurance, shaping the rhythms and politics of everyday life.

The politics of waiting: time as terrain of governance

Displacement in Benue is not only a spatial rupture but also a temporal one. For IDPs, time stretches and warps – not as a neutral backdrop, but as a condition to be navigated, endured and resisted. What emerges is a form of governance through time, where waiting becomes both a disciplinary tool and a site of improvisation. ‘We were told it was temporary. Now it’s six years. What is temporary in six years?’ asked Jennifer, a thirty-six-year-old displaced widow in Daudu II. Across the camps, IDPs described the temporal ambiguity of their situation – told to be patient while aid fluctuates, relocations stall and resettlement plans remain vague. Government and humanitarian actors often deploy time rhetorically: ‘soon’, ‘after elections’, ‘when funds come’. These elastic timelines leave IDPs suspended in uncertainty, shaping decisions around marriage, schooling and livelihoods. ‘I don’t want my daughter to marry here, but if we keep waiting, she will waste,’ said Mr Aondofa, a displaced father in Abagana.

Temporal infrastructures, improvised clocks and the politics beneath delay

Despite this uncertainty, IDPs forge their own ‘temporal infrastructures’ – social mechanisms to organize, mark and endure time. In Daudu II, youth groups created WhatsApp broadcast lists to monitor aid visits, while in Abagana women organized savings cooperatives pegged to market cycles rather than NGO calendars. Pentecostal churches across camps structure time through fasting programmes, prophecy vigils and spiritual calendars that anchor collective hope. These practices transform passive waiting into active survival, where time is organized communally rather than ceded to state or NGO schedules, not just in space but also in time. ‘We do not wait doing nothing. Every week we gather, pray, plan, share. If you sit quiet, hunger will finish you,’ said Veronica, a women’s leader in Naka camp.

While delays appear bureaucratic or logistical, they are often deeply political. In many cases, IDPs interpreted waiting as a form of abandonment or punishment, especially when aid coincided with political seasons. In Naka, residents observed that food and medical donations surged before elections, only to vanish afterwards. As Joshua, a youth mobilizer in Naka, said: ‘It’s like we’re in their pocket – when they need us, they open it. When not, we disappear.’ This politicized temporality produces what some scholars term governance by delay – where the state retains control not through visible action, but through prolonged inaction. IDPs learn to read time politically, adjusting behaviour around the rhythms of NGO visits, donor calendars and electoral cycles. Their waiting is never passive: it is filled with strategic silences, ritualized anticipation and calculated visibility.

Temporal experiences vary significantly across camps. In Naka, religious institutions structure daily life, offering rhythms of spiritual reassurance that stabilize hope. Abagana, due to its proximity to Makurdi, is more frequently visited by politicians and civil society groups – but this visibility is often tied to media attention or political gain, creating sporadic bursts of support followed by long silences. In Daudu II, time feels more stagnant. The withdrawal of key NGOs such as MSF has created a vacuum of activity, making each day indistinguishable from the next. These differences reveal how camp location, institutional presence and social capital shape temporal resilience; some communities adapt with hope, others with fatigue.

In this landscape, waiting becomes both burden and resistance. IDPs repurpose uncertainty as community, memory and defiance. They do not merely endure time – they make it. Through prayer circles, seasonal farming, youth organizing and informal economies, displaced people sustain life in conditions meant to keep them suspended. This echoes Brun’s (Reference Brun2015) insight that displacement is not merely spatial dislocation, but temporal disruption. The camp, far from being a zone of stasis, is reconfigured into a temporal city, governed not just by material absence but by asymmetric time regimes. IDPs, in turn, generate infrastructures of time – from the spiritual to the digital – that hold fractured futures together.

Synthesis: displacement as urban governance from below

In the camps of Benue State, displacement is not merely a condition of loss, but a generative terrain of governance, labour and improvisation. Stripped of formal protections, IDPs in Naka, Daudu II and Abagana mobilize what Simone (Reference Simone2004) calls people as infrastructure, weaving kinship, faith, barter, memory and digital tools into adaptive systems that sustain life where official structures falter. Rather than waiting passively for state intervention, they shape camp life: negotiating aid, organizing patrols, allocating shelter, arbitrating disputes and mediating fragmented authority. These practices echo Jansen’s (Reference Jansen2011) view of the camp as political space – not merely a humanitarian zone, but a site of contested sovereignty and political claim making.

Governance emerges not from central policy but from daily acts: who gets food, how shelters are shared, which leaders speak for the group, how rumours spread and how tensions are diffused. These are improvised in scarcity but shaped by deep local knowledge, social ties and strategic visibility. Crucially, this governance is urban in both form and function. The camps resemble informal city peripheries: they rely on vendors, churches, community schools and WhatsApp. Especially in Abagana, blurred lines between camp and town challenge binaries of displacement and urbanity. As Agier (Reference Agier2002) noted, camps become urban fragments – not voids of order, but sites of emergent regulation and survival from below. Yet governance varies. In Naka, religious networks facilitate structured aid mediation and conflict resolution. In Daudu II, distrust and donor fatigue have weakened cohesion, leading to youth-led justice experiments. Abagana’s closeness to Makurdi draws visibility but also politicized inclusion and neglect. These contrasts show that displacement governance is not uniform, but shaped by geography, history and social capital.

A paradox emerges: state absence compels IDPs to become infrastructural actors. They transform neglect into action – mobilizing kinship care, religious ties, informal economies, rotational leadership and solidarities rooted in shared precarity. These are not mere coping mechanisms but the often invisible, vernacular, emergent infrastructure, serving as connective tissue for urban life amid displacement. They challenge portrayals of IDPs as apolitical victims, revealing them as urban subjects engaged in improvisation and political life. These practices of waiting – marked by uncertainty and deferred hope – crystallize the logic of displacement as lived governance from below. The findings across different themes reveal not a single story of suffering, but a layered landscape of endurance, negotiation and social imagination.

Conclusion: precarity, everyday governance and the politics of waiting

This study set out to understand how IDPs in Benue State, Nigeria, survive and govern themselves under conditions of protracted displacement and state withdrawal. Drawing on ethnographic immersion, it challenges humanitarian narratives that depict camps as spaces of stasis and dependency. Instead, it shows that displacement produces dynamic forms of social organization, collective care and improvisational governance.

Amid state deficits, displaced persons birth what can be called relational infrastructures – kinship ties, faith-based support, informal markets and gendered solidarities. These networks do more than compensate for material lack; they constitute the very substance of governance. In line with Simone’s (Reference Simone2004) idea of people as infrastructure, IDPs mobilize existing social and moral resources to organize food sharing, informal education, self-policing and leadership structures. These are not stop-gap solutions, but recalibrated systems of governance from below – flexible, participatory, and deeply attuned to the lived realities of camp life. To understand these dynamics, this article has drawn explicitly on the framework of camp as urban space (Agier Reference Agier2002; Jansen Reference Jansen2011; Ramadan Reference Ramadan2013). Rather than viewing camps as humanitarian exceptions or isolated zones of bare life, this perspective foregrounds their emergence as urban political assemblages. In Benue, displacement camps function as hybrid urban spaces – shaped not by formal state planning but by informal labour, spatial improvisation and the social density of everyday life. Through micro-economies, religious arbitration, volunteer caregiving and youth-led initiatives, displaced populations actively shape the spatial, political and infrastructural contours of their environments.

These findings contribute to a growing body of work that views displacement as a driver of urbanization from below. Camps, in this framing, are not temporary or peripheral; they are sites of urban experimentation where displaced people assemble alternative modes of dwelling, organizing and governing. Urbanity here is not defined by infrastructure in the conventional sense – roads, electricity or planning – but by affective ties, moral economies and adaptive political practice. These spaces reveal new urban imaginaries formed under pressure, and new forms of authority forged through necessity. Importantly, this emergent urbanity is produced in tension with fragmented and often contradictory interventions by the state and by humanitarian actors. Government agencies oscillate between absence, surveillance and symbolic engagement. IDPs are rendered simultaneously as vulnerable subjects and as security threats. Camps are policed not to protect but to monitor and manage. This securitized logic reflects broader critiques of humanitarian government (Fassin and Pandolfi Reference Fassin and Pandolfi2010), where displaced populations are governed through ambiguity and control rather than inclusion or rights.

In response, displaced persons adopt temporal strategies to manage precarity. Waiting becomes a central mode of political life – strategic, anticipatory and deeply gendered. IDPs time their visibility around aid deliveries, political visits and humanitarian assessments. As Brun (Reference Brun2015) argues, waiting under displacement is not merely passive; it is an affective and relational act, through which people navigate abandonment and claim recognition. Women and youth, in particular, carry the burden of this temporal uncertainty while also pioneering creative responses to it – through informal schools, faith groups and caregiving networks. These patterns call for a shift in how displacement is understood. IDP camps in Benue are not outside the state or city; they produce new forms of urban life. Recognizing the camp as urban space reveals displaced people as political actors making infrastructure, authority and community.

This study calls on humanitarian and state actors to rethink how aid is conceptualized and delivered in contexts of protracted displacement. Rather than imposing external solutions, future interventions should engage the already existing social infrastructures – faith groups, gendered care networks and informal leadership structures – through which displaced communities govern themselves. These local arrangements offer durable, context-sensitive responses to abandonment and must be supported rather than bypassed. Future research should pay closer attention to how gender, age and ethnicity shape these informal systems of authority and care. Comparative ethnographies across different regions and displacement contexts could deepen understanding of how governance emerges from below, and under what conditions it is sustained or fractured. Ultimately, displacement in Benue should not be viewed as a void, but as a dense, generative space of political experimentation – one that demands recognition and inclusion in both scholarly analysis and policy design.