State Fragility, State Formation, and Human Security in Nigeria: Introduction, Concepts, and Questions

Abstract

This book is an outcome of the conference “‘(Un)civil Society’? State Failure and the Contradictions of Self-Organisation in Nigeria,” May 14–17, 2005, sponsored by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and organized by Axel Harneit-Sievers. The conference focused on the conceptual and practical meanings of “uncivil society,” and many of the papers presented considered the extent to which Nigeria was a failed state. But this book presents the argument that while those conceptual explorations remain valid for scholars of Nigerian and African politics, it is also important to more deliberately interrogate and contextualize “uncivil society” and state failure, rather than accept them at face value.

This chapter owes a lot to Axel Harneit-Sievers, who wrote its first manifestation, at a time when I was supposed to coedit the text with him and Dr. Olufemi Akinola. The current version has changed tremendously since that first writing, to take into consideration, many of the empirical changes that have occurred in Nigeria, and also as a ref lection of the difference in perspective of its current author and sole editor.