5. Northeast Overview

In the international media, Boko Haram and #BringBackOurGirls are emblematic of conflict and insecurity in Nigeria. But this is reductive both to Nigeria as a whole and to conflict in the Northeast itself. As detailed in this book, across the country there are patterns of criminal, intra-communal, inter-communal, ethno-sectarian, political, and separatist conflict drivers and trends. Emanating from the Northeast, the phenomenon of Boko Haram has elements of all those types. Notwithstanding the fact that Boko Haram was designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. Department of State in November 2013, there is no group that calls itself Boko Haram. Before 2009, such extremists were sometimes called the Nigerian Taliban or the Nigerian Mujahideen. Residents of Maiduguri, in Borno State, eventually started calling them Boko Haram, which is a Hausa derivation referring to something ambiguous (Books? Education? Fraud? (Murphy 2014)) as being religiously forbidden, or haram. Usually, when people said Boko Haram, they were referring to the followers of Muhammed Yusuf, whose own group was actually called Jamā’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-da’wa wal-Jihād (JAS). Now, every time a bomb explodes, a police officer is shot, a bank is robbed, or a village is attacked, the incident is attributed generically in the media to Boko Haram, regardless of whether JAS had anything to do with it. The various objectives of violence seem inconsistent and at times even at cross-purpose. While many attacks are no doubt inspired by ideology, others are ethno-sectarian, or criminal. Some attacks have more to do with state or national politics than any radical jihadist agenda, which would seek to usurp or replace the existing political structures. The anarchic nature of the violence suggests a more complex dynamic than a simple diagnosis of insurgency.