“Living in Peace is Better Than Living as a Prince”: The Lexicon of Peace and Security in Hausaphone Nigeria

Most peacebuilding and development research is conducted and published in English, even when it examines non-Anglophone contexts. Contemporary peacebuilding, whether predicated on concepts of negative and positive peace (Galtung, 1996) or more recent theorisations of everyday peace (Firchow, 2018; Mac Ginty, 2013), often presumes universality, or at least the possibility of ready and largely equivalent adaptation to languages other than English. Development research often has a similar premise. In this briefing, we discuss the linguistic limits of transferring peacebuilding concepts to Hausa, a language spoken by more than 70 million people in West Africa, and the effective lingua franca of central and northern Nigeria. ¹ Recounting our experience in 2020–21 as three researchers who attempted to use a variant of the everyday peace indicators (EPI) methodology principally developed by Firchow and Mac Ginty, we examine how peace and security are conceptualised and anchored in Hausa. We also briefly discuss Hausa's history with concepts of development.

Like most languages, Hausa has its own subtleties. Our briefing reflects on the difficulty lexical items—words—even those that appear to have commonly accepted, if sometimes contested, definitions—have in traveling across cultural-linguistic boundaries.

Everyday Peace

The EPI methodology proposes to address a common problem in peace and conflict studies: a predominant focus on elite experiences and behavior. Everyday peace indicators instead centers on the experiences of ordinary people, rather than elites; on those people's everyday experiences of violence and insecurity, rather than on the most spectacular incidents; and, on how these people themselves define peace (Mac Ginty, 2013; Ware and Ware, 2022). Implicit in the EPI, and in the concept of everyday peace more broadly, is a positive definition of peace: that peace is more than the absence of violence.

Our Approach to Using the EPI in Nigeria

We were drawn to the EPI approach because of its focus on the experiences of ordinary citizens. By looking at the practices of individuals, families, and communities amid violence, we hoped our research would move beyond a familiar quantification or summary of violent episodes or structural factors.

We conducted a pilot study in two local government areas (LGAs), Nigeria's equivalent of counties, in three states in central and northern Nigeria: Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Plateau. A US-based institutional review board granted an exemption from full ethics review in March 2021. ²

Local government area selection was based on factors including accessibility, a known history of security or insecurity, and other demographic and economic variables. In keeping with the tendency across this part of Nigeria, these LGAs had often experienced insecurity in living memory. This meant that some of our research areas in Nasarawa and Plateau saw violence ongoing during the research itself, whereas in other areas there were no notable conflict developments while the research was conducted, and none in recent years, either.

Our hope was that a mix of LGAs would draw out substate variation, while, we anticipated, showing several commonalities. We conducted 28 focus groups, as well as 56 additional key informant interviews with respondents we assessed as difficult or impractical to include in focus groups (i.e., vigilante group members). Our questions were translated into Hausa, and most discussions and interviews were conducted in Hausa.

Understanding Peace

Most respondents were animated by discussions of peace and at least willing to consider what everyday peace meant to them. Several respondents cited the Hausa proverb: Zaman lafiya ya fi zaman dan sarki (living in peace is better than living as a prince). ³ As Bambale (2022, p. 79) has explained, this proverb originates in the Hausa worldview that life is supposed to be difficult. For almost all respondents, peace was understood narrowly, at least initially as the absence of direct violence. Expectations of what would constitute peace were low: as one woman put it, peace “is the mere ability to sleep with [my] eyes closed.” ⁴ We had anticipated that initial discussions might focus on the presence or absence of direct violence, and consequently our research protocol had several questions to elucidate the broader theme, including asking respondents how they noticed peace in their everyday life, the meanings of peace that were important to them, and the signs they looked for to determine peace were present in their community. We knew that similar questions had been asked in other contexts where the EPI approach had been applied.

These questions did prompt some wider reflections on what peace meant, at least from some respondents. Many respondents did hold multiple understandings of peace, beyond the absence of violence. Both metaphorically and literally, several respondents despondently noted that “the doves are gone.” ⁵ For these respondents, peace thus meant (and could be measured by) interspecies harmony or at least interspecies tolerance.

The Lexicon of Peace and Security in Hausa

While there was variation across the research area, and among different categories of respondents, and our research identified about 50 locally derived indicators (Bukar et al., 2021), we found that our respondents were often keener to discuss security, insecurity, and violence, rather than “peace.” In part, we attribute this tendency to the constraints of language. In this mainly Hausaphone context, the possibilities for translating “peace” are much more limited than those for “security,” and thus, how respondents engage with these terms through translation differed. In Hausa, peace can be translated either as zaman lafiya or salama. But these are not equivalent terms. Zaman lafiya is an important concept in Hausa philosophy and refers to both peaceful living and coexistence, based on good relationships with others (Bambale, 2022). For instance, the sentence: akwai zaman lafiya a garin nan means there is peaceful coexistence (among neighbors) in this town.

There are several variants of salama, including sallama, and salame, all of which derive from the Arabic word for peace, salam. These words are used to convey greetings, convey the state of inner peace that a person has, or wishes to have, but can also be used to imply the successfulness of common events, whether relating to the self or others. For example, one might discuss a person being discharged from hospital in good health, by saying an salame shi. This same phrase could also be used, with sallama, in reference to someone being laid off from work without acrimony. The peacefulness of parting ways is implied by the usage of sallama.

The point is that an individualistic approach to defining peace (i.e., a standard EPI question, what does peace mean to you?) has limits in Hausa because Hausaphone respondents are strongly socialised to the ideas of relational peace inherent in zaman lafiya. In Hausa, peace is thus a lexically anchored, rather than openly flexible term. This is not the only such case in Hausa. Happiness, for example, also has no direct lexical equivalent in Hausa and can be interpreted in different, but largely determined, ways (Pawlak, 2018).

Meanwhile, security is typically translated as tsaro, as in the expression, Tsaro na kawo zaman lafiya (“there is no peace without security”; the expression can also mean “security brings about peace”). Such nuances are largely absent from the term “peace” alone. Moreover, for some Hausa-speakers, zaman lafiya (peace) is interchangeable with tsaro (security).

There are further lexical nuances: for instance, the words “secure” and “security” can be translated quite differently and offer different levels of abstraction. In the phrase wanda ya tsira daga haɗari a more general, abstract sense of being secure is being conveyed. The phrase sakin jiki, however, implies a much stronger, practical sense of being secure, closer to that of the everyday. If one were to remark on feeling safe about leaving the house at night to urinate outside, for example, one might say sakin jiki cikin duhun dare, yana nuna ce wa.

Another important lexical feature of Hausa is how it treats temporality. As a tenseless language, Hausa grammar does not restrict the relation in language between the time an event occurred (the reference time) and the time it is written or spoken about (the utterance time) (Mucha, 2012). Consequently, the temporality of any sentence can only be inferred, rather than explicitly defined. Without delving too far into linguistics, this means that, in principle, a given sentence can be understood as referring to the past, present, or future (Mucha, 2012).

These features of Hausa render both the implementation of any methodological research framework considerably more challenging than might first appear. As we discuss in the next section, these features argue for a linguistically sensitive approach to conducting peace research. Moreover, they suggest that the investigation of peace itself may not always be the most contextually appropriate task.

Implications for Research Practice and Theory in Peace and Development

Research respondents rarely conform to expectations. Research practices need to be adaptive to context and circumstances. Conflict research is often messy and single stories and simplistic narratives often misleading. To that end, the EPI has been developed as a practice-orientated methodology with a loose framework that is meant to be adapted and broad enough to permit such adaptation.

Still, given the responses of many of our respondents, we find it necessary to problematise the EPI approach or at least its conceptual reliance on “peace.” Our experience suggests that focusing on the term “peace” may be inherently limiting, even beyond the academic debate that treats peace as an essentially contested concept (at least in English). We suggest that “everyday security” may be a term more culturally and linguistically inclusive, at least among Hausa-speaking communities.

As we have discussed, in Hausa, security is a term that has greater lexical range. A security framing may therefore be more appropriate to present to, and use with, respondents linguistically conditioned to interpret and understand “security” more broadly than they would interpret and understand “peace.” This approach appreciates that concepts travel across languages more differently than is generally acknowledged in the peace studies and peacebuilding fields.

Focusing on security instead of peace is not necessarily incompatible with an EPI approach. Beyond the EPI, we recognise that we are not the first to discuss “everyday security,” which may align with, but also be distinct from, formal security initiatives (see e.g., Crawford & Hutchinson, 2016). Nyman (2021) wrote of the need to disaggregate and recombine dimensions of space, practice, and affect in everyday security, also noting that the word security is socially situated in language. We would go further: language (in its lexical and linguistic aspects) constitutes a dimension in itself. The choice of lexical terms by researchers, and the complexity and assumptions such choice implies on the part of the linguistic communities on which research is visited, clearly matters. If researchers better anticipate the lexical distinctions already in the minds of respondents, which cannot be divorced from how people make sense of and report their lived experiences, then research practices may be more locally nuanced and meaningful to both the researchers and the researched, or at least more responsive to local linguistic circumstances.

From a theoretical perspective, if “the local is the place in which everyday lives are enacted” (Haines, 2012, p. 9), and if “the local is the place where peace should be defined” (van Leeuwen et al., 2020, pp. 279–280), then it follows that the local is also the place where security should be defined, and where everyday peace and everyday security are also enacted. Enactment occurs through language, and consequently, in Hausa-speaking communities, any academic study of peace and security may counterintuitively require a shift away from the language of peace, given both the preconceptions the term “peace” carries and its inherent silences in this linguistic context. In making a conceptual shift to everyday security, we might be more likely to conduct research that is genuinely centered for the benefit of local actors.

While our study did not concern development research, development as a concept is likely subject to similar linguistic considerations. Actualisation of the linguistic turn in development discourse remains long overdue (Wolff, 2016) and understanding development's potentially myriad subtleties in Hausa (and indeed, in many other languages) has yet to occur. While the word “development” can be simply translated in Hausa as ci gaba, denoting the idea of moving forward, in line with paradigmatic conceptions of development as progress, as Hill and Ameka (2022, p. 2) point out, many do not know “how to approach the language question in development.” Future research could examine alternative linguistic conceptions of development more deeply, particularly in a Hausaphone context.