Rethinking Boko Haram: The Evolution of a Jihadist Group Since 2015

Since the early 2000s, the Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram has been the subject of thousands of works by journalists, intelligence and NGO officers, and academic writers. Yet due to recycled themes, stale narratives, and fragmented sources, knowledge about the movement's origins, motivations, and continued transformation remains incomplete.

Rethinking Boko Haram provides much-needed updates to older understandings of Boko Haram's religious, political, social, and economic dimensions, proposing new concepts and approaches to the continued study of the movement. Beginning in 2015 when Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS and became the Islamic State in West African Province (ISWAP), this collection deploys firsthand accounts, primary source materials, and fieldwork alongside theoretical approaches to present a new understanding of Boko Haram, from its interactions with the Nigerian military to its more recent adaptations for survival in the face of dwindling local support, climate change, and attempts to build administrations and alliances.

Timely and necessary, Rethinking Boko Haram invites readers to reconceptualize the movement's core elements, revisit its religious motivations, and better understand its possible future.

Michael O. Nwankpa is Founder and Director of the Centre for African Conflict and Development, an independent research center based in London, United Kingdom. He is author of Nigeria's Fourth Republic, 1999–2021: A Militarized Democracy (2023) and editor withAbdulbasit Kassimof The Boko Haram Reader: From Nigerian Preachers to the Islamic State (2018). He is Research Associate in the African Centre for the Study of the United States and the Centre for Mediation in Africa within the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria, Associate Fellow at RUSI, and Fellow at the Center on Armed Groups.