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Boko Haram: Islamism, politics, security and the state in Nigeria

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Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos

Foreword

Gérard Chouin

Texte intégral

1This is the first volume entirely dedicated to the analysis of a violent confrontation which has escalated in north-eastern Nigeria since the mid-2000s, between federal forces and an Islamic sectarian movement which gradually transformed into a radical jihadist armed rebellion. Commonly known as ‘Boko Haram’, the movement was unknown to most people outside Maiduguri before 2009, when federal forces launched a military offensive against its headquarters. Extremely violent, the crackdown eventually resulted – in addition to several hundred victims hastily buried in mass graves – in the transformation of a limited in scale but well-structured Islamic sectarian movement into an underground, clandestine armed organisation with possible connections to the ever-changing jihadist scene in Africa and beyond.

2Writing about Boko Haram is a difficult task, as researchers have very limited access to first-hand information. Indeed, foreign and national researchers find it almost impossible to conduct fieldwork in north-eastern Nigeria, where their security cannot be guaranteed. Recently, as the core of the conflict has seemed to be moving away from Maiduguri, capital of Borno, to the confines of Nigeria, the shores of Lake Chad and along the Cameroonian border, available information on the conflict has become even scarcer.

3Such difficulties contrast with the pressing demand of the Nigerian public and the international community alike for intelligible analyses of the situation. Nigeria is the demographic and ideological centre of gravity of a very large part of West and Central Africa. The area we know today as northern Nigeria has long been a source of new ideas and knowledge that fed Islamic practice, thinking, and teaching far beyond its colonial borders. As such, the violent, poorly-managed, spiralling confrontation between the Federal Republic of Nigeria and a seemingly well-entrenched, widespread, armed Islamic movement can generate only considerable anxiety among regional stakeholders, who fear the general unrest of a large part of West and Central Africa.

4The response of the academic community to such pressing demands has been largely disappointing, simply because the context is unfavourable to the production of reliable knowledge. The fear of violence and reprisals against scholars living in exposed areas, the ideological biases or political correctness which paralyse many channels of thought when dealing with Islam and terrorism, and the lack of available data – all have contributed to a relatively repetitive and shallow academic production on the Boko Haram crisis.

5In this volume, edited by a leading French specialist on Nigeria, we have attempted to adopt an original standpoint in publishing a limited number of essays which, taken together, are an attempt to renovate the way we produce scholarship on such an underground movement. We have brought together a large variety of scholars, many of them related to the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA-Nigeria) in a one way or another, from Nigeria, France, Germany, the UK and the US. Some immersed themselves in fieldwork a few years ago, when this was still possible. They brought back outstanding data on northern Nigeria that can no longer be collected today. Others used discourse analysis or existing data on violence in Nigeria in ways never attempted before. Some are well-known scholars in the field, while others have signed here their first scholarly publication.

6Far from being an univocal assemblage of papers, the book fosters debate in constructive ways. With this book, we hope to be able to stimulate new scholarly discussions on the fast-replicating emergence across the Sahelian belt of a series of movements that cannot be satisfactorily described only in simple terms as violent, terrorist or jihadist. For a movement such as Boko Haram to mutate from a sectarian group splitting away from the Izala movement to a full-grown rebellion threatening the integrity of the most powerful state in West Africa, you need more than religious fanatics, violent Salafist ideology, and intolerance. The ingredients that fuel the fire spreading across north-eastern Nigeria are yet to be fully described. Some are to be found within the existence of a political elite used to buying off the settlement of insurgencies and social crises and incapable of responding to a new type of threat, ideological in nature, otherwise than through the use of blunt force. Other elites among security forces also hide their own secret agendas, as sustained violence legitimates accrued budgets and assists them secure new lucrative markets for themselves, in ways inherited from the pre-1999 era.

7This book is not a cookbook. All the ingredients of the crisis are not identified, and it does not pretend to provide recipes to solve current issues. It merely offers a variety of glimpses into the Boko Haram phenomenon and fosters a better and more nuanced understanding of a crisis that threatens to destabilise a large part of Africa, and into the way we discuss it. Boko Haram has redefined the way jihadists challenge the post-colonial state in Africa. The probabilities are high that this model will soon be exported outside Nigeria. This book is timely.

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