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On the Brink? The Nigerian State and the Making of Boko Haram

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Boko Haram and International Law

Abstract

The rise of Boko Haram as a terrorist group in Nigeria has been attributed to different factors ranging from poor governance, poverty and socio-economic deprivation, to struggle for political power at the centre as a means to Nigeria’s oil wealth. In this chapter, I briefly sketch the several layers of interconnected local, regional and international factors that have combined to produce one of the deadliest terrorist groups in the world. I argue that just as international law has struggled to grapple with the challenges posed by international terrorism as a legal phenomenon, combating the local manifestation of this phenomenon by states such as Nigeria has been constrained by the international legal lacunae as much as by a confluence of domestic social, economic, religious and political fault lines, the most threatening of which, in the case of a deeply divided country like Nigeria, is the dangerous mix of religion and politics, which have combined to produce Boko Haram and have brought the most populous black nation on earth to the brink.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is an enormous wealth of literature on the subject of terrorism. For a comprehensive account of the history of terrorism, see for example, the collection of essays in Chaliand and Blin (2007). The question of who is a terrorist is almost always evident in every literature on the subject. Depending on the persuasions of the observer, this view is also reflected in our conception of the subject and its history. See for example, Burleigh (2010), Harper Collings.

  2. 2.

    For a detailed account of the ancient history of terrorism, see Laqueur (2001), pp. 3–20; Begorre-Bret (2006), p. 1990.

  3. 3.

    Laqueur (2001), p. viii.

  4. 4.

    Gasser (2002), p. 556.

  5. 5.

    For example, the hijacking of Al Israeli aircraft, the September 11 attacks in the USA, are just a few.

  6. 6.

    See Sciolino (2004).

  7. 7.

    Cowell (2005).

  8. 8.

    Bonner and Perlez (2005), Hana et al. (2015) and Bluy et al. (2015).

  9. 9.

    BBC News (2016a).

  10. 10.

    BBC News (2016b).

  11. 11.

    Ahmed (2013).

  12. 12.

    Robinson and Landauro (2015).

  13. 13.

    BBC News (2015b).

  14. 14.

    BBC News (2016c).

  15. 15.

    BBC News (2016d).

  16. 16.

    BBC News (2012, 2015a).

  17. 17.

    BBC News (2015c).

  18. 18.

    Human Rights Watch (2016).

  19. 19.

    Some groups like Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Al Shabab in Somalia, Boko Haram and Al Nusra all start off as domestic terrorist groups with local grievances and largely limiting their operations to their host-states bases. But they subsequently link up with more established and better resourced groups like Al Qaeda and IS with global expansionist agendas and thereupon begin to project regional expansionist tendencies. See generally, Ranstorp (2009), pp. 209–219.

  20. 20.

    See for example, Zelin (2014), p. 1.

  21. 21.

    Higgins (1997), pp. 14–15.

  22. 22.

    See the contribution by Udoka Owie in this volume.

  23. 23.

    See Higgins (1997), p. 16.

  24. 24.

    See Article 1(2) of the Arab Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism, adopted by the League of Arab States on 22 April 1998 at Cairo. (Translated from Arabic by the United Nations English translation service (Unofficial translation) 29 May 2000).

  25. 25.

    See 1(2) of the Convention of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference on Combating International Terrorism, Annex to Resolution No: 59/26-P, adopted at the Twenty-Sixth Session of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 1 July 1999.

  26. 26.

    See Article 3(a) of the Organisation of African Unity Convention on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism, adopted at Algiers on 14 July 1999.

  27. 27.

    See Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention of Terrorism adopted at Warsaw on 16 May 2005. Article 1 of the Convention defines terrorism by reference to the definitions adopted in eleven other instruments on terrorism listed in the Appendix to the Convention.

  28. 28.

    According to Ben Saul, acts labelled terrorism are as significant as those not labelled terrorism and given the varied occasions and circumstances in which the term has been used, it would be ‘fallacious to assert pragmatically that terrorism is recognizable without difficulty, or to claim intuitively that “what looks, smells and kills like terrorism is terrorism”. Disagreement about terrorism runs much deeper than technical disputes about drafting; it reflects doctrinal, ideological, and jurisprudential arguments about who is entitled to exercise violence, against whom, and for what purposes.’ See Saul (2008), p. 4. (Footnotes omitted).

  29. 29.

    Cassese (2006), p. 934.

  30. 30.

    Greenwood (2003), p. 506. See also, Luck (2004), pp. 86–88.

  31. 31.

    Dupuy (2004), pp. 4–6, discussing the shifts in the attitudes of States towards combating terrorism in the absence of a generally accepted definition.

  32. 32.

    Saul (2008), p. 5.

  33. 33.

    Flory (1997), p. 35. See also, Duffy (2005), pp. 2–3. See Saul (2008), p. 5.

  34. 34.

    See Cassese (2006), p. 935. See Saul (2008), p. 4.

  35. 35.

    Duffy (2005), pp. 43–45.

  36. 36.

    See for example, Slaughter and Burke (2002), p. 2 arguing that new rules are required to deal with the new kinds of threats the war on terrorism poses in the twenty-first century.

  37. 37.

    Slaughter and Burke (2002), pp. 1–21; Franck (2004), pp. 686–688; Heinz (2009), pp. 87–105; French (2003), pp. 31–46. For an earlier expression of this view prior to the events of 9/11, see Blum (1986), pp. 133–138.

  38. 38.

    Slaughter and Burke (2002), p. 2. This new development in international law, it is argued permits countries like the US and its allies to respond to terrorist attacks. See Byers (2002), pp. 409–410.

  39. 39.

    See Okafor (2005), pp. 171–191 disputing this claim of newness and fundamental change brought about in international law by terrorism; Abi-Saab (2004), pp. xiii–xxii.

  40. 40.

    See Abi-Saab (2004), pp. xiii–xxii.

  41. 41.

    Duffy (2005), pp. 2–3.

  42. 42.

    Cassese (2006), p. 942.

  43. 43.

    Duffy (2005), pp. 43–48.

  44. 44.

    See generally, Cassese (2006), pp. 933–958.

  45. 45.

    See Institute for Economics and Peace (2016).

  46. 46.

    See Okpaga et al. (2012), p. 79.

  47. 47.

    Imre (2008), p. 10.

  48. 48.

    Okpaga et al. (2012), p. 85.

  49. 49.

    Walker (2012), p. 13.

  50. 50.

    Agbiboa and Maiangwa (2014), p. 74. Senator Ndume was once arrested and charged with financing Boko Haram; recently, a Local Council boss was also arrested for links with Boko Haram. Several security personnel within the armed forces and the police, sometimes at very senior levels have been implicated for either being members, funders, or sympathisers of Boko Haram. See for example, Onuoha (2010), p. 56; Walker (2012), p. 3.

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  1. Department of Jurisprudence, School of Law, University of Venda, Thohoyandou, South Africa

    John-Mark Iyi

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    John-Mark Iyi

  2. Faculty of Law, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Hennie Strydom

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Iyi, JM. (2018). On the Brink? The Nigerian State and the Making of Boko Haram. In: Iyi, JM., Strydom, H. (eds) Boko Haram and International Law. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74957-0_1

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