{"id":8922,"date":"2016-05-02T21:20:16","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T21:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=8922"},"modified":"2016-05-02T21:26:24","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T21:26:24","slug":"why-so-many-people-join-boko-haram-despite-its-notorious-violence-by-hilary-matfess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=8922","title":{"rendered":"Why so many people join Boko Haram, despite its notorious violence by Hilary Matfess"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Just over two years ago, the extremist Islamist group Boko Haram became infamous worldwide for kidnapping nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls, most of whom are still missing today. However, within the Lake Chad Basin region, a region straddling Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon in West Africa, Boko Haram already was widely known for the brutality it had visited on its neighbors.<\/p>\n

So why would anyone join?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the question recently investigated by the Nigeria Social Violence Research project at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, the Center for Complex Operations, and Mercy Corps.<\/p>\n

Many observers have worried about the group\u2019s ideological pull, and by extension, that of other extremist groups. But a careful reading of these reports reveals something simpler and far more specifically local. To be glib, it\u2019s the socioeconomy, stupid. Below you\u2019ll find some background on the group and a summary of the three most notable ways that Boko Haram has recruited.<\/p>\n

At first, Boko Haram filled a state vacuum by offering social services and a group identity in a region bereft of both<\/p>\n

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According to data from the Nigeria Social Violence Project, Boko Haram started as a local, dissident Salafist sect in 2002 in northeast Nigeria. Salafism is an ultraconservative school of thought in Sunni Islam that advocates a strict adherence to the early Islam of the Koran and Sunna. Mohammed Yusuf, the group\u2019s founder, did not necessarily envision the group as a primarily militant group; he ran a farm and even arranged marriages for his members.<\/p>\n

Since Nigeria began exporting oil, the government has marginalized its non-oil-producing northeast region economically, pushing it into decline and failing to offer social services like health and education. The difference in development indicators between states in the northeast and in other regions illustrates just how marginalized that region has been. Consider that in Nigeria\u2019s northeast state of Borno, literacy is estimated at just 46 percent for boys and 34 percent for girls \u2014 while in the southern state of Imo, the literacy rate is above 98 percent for both boys and girls.
\nTo fill that gap, local groups organized self-help networks along religious or ethnic lines. Boko Haram was one of those groups serving as a kind of para-government, offering help paying the bills; support for the unemployed, widows, and children; and a sense of belonging that filled the gap left by the absent state. By the mid-2000s Boko Haram had expanded its state-like activities into paramilitary incursions, violently attacking other Salafist and Muslim groups that critiqued its interpretation of the Quran.<\/p>\n

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Those parallel lines of paranational activity \u2013 social services combined with violence against what it envisioned as competing groups \u2014 continued until 2009. That\u2019s when Nigeria cracked down on on the group\u2019s escalating violence, killing more than 700 suspected Boko Haram members. Since then, Boko Haram has become even more aggressive in its insurgency, treating the Nigerian government as illegitimate and violently expanding its own territory.<\/p>\n

Yes, Boko Haram does recruit by force<\/p>\n

A significant proportion of the members of Boko Haram were kidnapped into the group. Once abducted, young men and women are subjected to propagandistic preaching, described as \u201cKoranic education\u201d by the insurgents, that asserts that anyone outside of the movement is foolish and acting against God. Abduction and indoctrination have been effective tools for the group.<\/p>\n

Not just the Chibok girls: Boko Haram’s war on children<\/p>\n

The kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok, Nigeria is the most infamous of Boko Haram’s atrocities. But the militant Islamists’s reign of terror has had a devastating affect on more than a million of the the region’s children. (Jason Aldag\/The Washington Post)
\nBoko Haram also offers loans and entrepreneurial assistance \u2026<\/p>\n

But despite the violence directed outward, Boko Haram has continued functioning as a kind of state within its region. As Mercy Corps has documented, people in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin have turned to Boko Haram for help. Mercy Corps documented a number of instances in which aspiring and fledgling entrepreneurs accepted loans and capital from Boko Haram. According to the report, Boko Haram has recruited by exploiting \u201ccommon desires of youth in this region, to get ahead economically and distinguish themselves in their communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026 and arranges for young men to have wives<\/p>\n

On my own recent research trip, supported by the National Defense University\u2019s Center for Complex Operations, I found that the region\u2019s economic difficulties altered the communities\u2019 \u2018marriage markets,\u2019 making it financially difficult for young men to marry. Anthropological research in the 1960s noted that men in the region\u2019s Kanuri communities \u201clower their social status by not being married due to their need to eat at the houses of neighbors, friends, relatives, or superiors who have wives.\u201d
\nBoko Haram fills that need as well, supplying wives to loyal Boko Haram soldiers. One displaced woman in Maiduguri told me that Boko Haram appeals to some young men because they \u201ccan take a wife at no extra charge. Usually it is very expensive to take a wife, very hard to get married, but not now.\u201d<\/p>\n

In some Boko Haram\u2019s cells, the marriage process is surprisingly intricate. In a number of instances, women who had been taken as \u201cwives\u201d by Boko Haram recalled that their father had been given a \u201cbride price\u201d and that the marriage ceremony had been a public affair within Boko Haram\u2019s camps, where \u201csoldiers sang and celebrated as if it were a normal wedding.\u201d<\/p>\n

In many instances, the women must undergo a certain amount of \u201cKoranic education\u201d by the sect before being eligible to be married. Some women reported that this took as long as six months. From a woman\u2019s point of view, Boko Haram kidnaps and systematically sexually assaults women and girls. But it\u2019s done in a way that\u2019s formalized and, superficially, legitimate \u2014 satisfying the desire of many of the region\u2019s young men to have wives and the social status that accompanies marriage.<\/p>\n

\"boko<\/a>All politics is local<\/p>\n

In other words, Boko Haram isn\u2019t just a violent scourge. It attracts members because it offers a kind of normalcy in a region effectively abandoned by the state, including commerce, marriage, social services, identity, and belonging.<\/p>\n

All politics, including that of violent extremism, is indeed local.<\/p>\n

Hilary Matfess is a research analyst with the Center for Complex Operations at the National Defense University and a researcher with the Nigeria Social Violence Project. Follow her on Twitter @HilaryMatfess.<\/p>\n

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just over two years ago, the extremist Islamist group Boko Haram became infamous worldwide for kidnapping nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls, most of whom are still missing today. However, within the Lake Chad Basin region, a region straddling Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon in West Africa, Boko Haram already was widely known for the brutality it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[34,1889,1887,1888],"class_list":["post-8922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-boko-haram","tag-johns-hopkins-university","tag-lake-chad-basin","tag-nigeria-social-violence-research-project"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4oswh-2jU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8922"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8925,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8922\/revisions\/8925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}