In the wake of Boko Haram’s Terror: A Study of Internal Displacement in Northeast Nigeria

Abstract

This dissertation investigates internal displacement caused by Boko Haram’s violent extremism and insurgency in Nigeria’s northeastern state of Borno. Specifically, I examine how new social and economic structures, that is, actual modes of practical future building, are generated, and how those structures enable or stifle the capacities of displaced people to construct meaningful lives. In effect, my study shows how social and economic life unfold at different displacement sites, namely - camps, settlements, and host communities - that Internally Displaced People (IDPs) resettle in, and reveals how they rebuild their lives in those spaces. I take into account the ways state emergency-management agencies and humanitarian organizations do or do not run these sites to ‘manage’ the displaced; and how they invest resources and aid in affected communities and local economies. As a study that notes that IDPs experience disparate existential predicaments, I provide a comparative ethnographic examination of life and the discrete IDPs experiences in those sites. The goal is to addresses gaps in scholarship on forced migration and post-conflict reconstruction that mostly focus on single sites of displacement. The study therefore provides “thick” ethnographic descriptions and insights into how different continuities of forced and voluntary mobility occur in the arena of displacement. It shows how new structures of social and economic life come to being in ways that reconfigure society and shape IDP interpersonal, intergroup, and institutional relations.