Boko Haram

When referring to the terrorist group known as “Boko Haram,” observers are broadly pointing to a violent, Salafist-jihadist group (in its various incarnations and often encompassing its offshoots) based in northeastern Nigeria, which seeks to establish a caliphate ruled by sharia law in northeastern Nigeria and its environs. The group that served as its predecessor was founded in 2002 in Maiduguri, Nigeria, by Mohammed Yusuf, and was named “Jama’atu Ahil as-Sunna li ad-Da’wa wa al-Jihad,” or “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad” (JAS). By the time that the group became violent in 2009—also the year that Yusuf died and the group was taken over by Abubakar Shekau—observers had begun to refer to the group as “Boko Haram,” broadly meaning “Western education is sinful” or “forbidden.” Even after the group pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and became the Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP) in March 2015, and later faced the breakaway of a splinter group in 2016, observers have still referred to these iterations as “Boko Haram.” In other words, this article, which is ostensibly about “Boko Haram,” is more generally about the various incarnations of the above-referenced group, the nature of its violence, its cycles of leadership, its shifting global and regional affiliations, and the offshoot groups which it has engendered, all of which continue to be referred to by more casual observers as “Boko Haram,” even though none of the above iterations of the group referred to themselves as such, at least formally. While this article is one that seeks to provide an overview of the best literature available on the emergence, evolution, and current activities of the “Boko Haram” phenomenon, given the multi- and interdisciplinary study of the group—most commonly undertaken by scholars of political science, history, religion, and conflict and security—there is no singular, unifying intellectual framework by which to study the group. Instead, writings on Boko Haram have occurred across disciplines, and as we articulate in the subsections below, have been defined by two general approaches. On one hand, scholars of Boko Haram have often written comprehensive histories of the group, attempting to understand the organization writ large, while on the other, others have written about particular facets of the group relating to Boko Haram’s emergence, ideology, patterns of violence, treatment of gender and age, and interactions with global jihadist organizations, and impact on communities in which it operates. In the pages below, we detail what we view to be the most rigorous pieces written to date in each of these two broad categories, keeping in mind that given space restrictions, we were not able to include sections on every facet of the Boko Haram insurgency.