01
The Second Uprising
How a defeated movement taught its successor to win
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Research
Research Essays
Forty-five years of organised violence in Northern Nigeria have produced a vast literature and almost no reckoning. These six essays attempt one. They trace the theological architecture behind the insurgency, the governance failures that fed it, the women and girls consumed by it, and the man who led it through a decade of declared deaths. Taken together, they argue that what looks like a succession of crises is a single, recurring pattern, one that the Nigerian state has had every opportunity to break, and has not.
02
The Lost Decade
A government convenes an official inquiry into a mass killing, takes testimony, compiles a report, identifies those responsible — and then does nothing.
03
Abandoned by Nigeria, twice
The people of northeastern Nigeria survived Boko Haram. Then the Nigerian government told them the crisis was over — and left them to survive that, too.
04
Women as Instruments
Boko Haram abducted girls to enslave them. It also used them as suicide bombers. Scholarly literature treats these as separate programmes. They are not.
05
The Man Who Was Nothing Before God
A man who murdered associates over trivialities presented himself, on camera, as a composed and theologically certain instrument of divine will.
06
The Man Who Would Not Stay Dead
Abubakar Shekau died five times. Each time the Nigerian military announced his demise, he appeared on camera to mock them. What looks like a farce of bad intelligence was, in fact, a deliberate strategy of survival, theology, and brand-building that outlasted the man himself.