Ten years of Boko Haram: how transportation drives Africa’s deadliest insurgency

This article challenges the ways in which much scholarship on terrorism and insurgencies have been ‘a-mobile.’ It addresses this problem by drawing on the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ to explore analytically how the decade-long Boko Haram insurgency in north-eastern Nigeria have developed around the system of automobility and have simultaneously been transformed by it. The analysis extends to the impact of the violent insurgency and state regulation on populations whose livelihoods are rooted in mobility. Foregrounding automobility as a lethal weapon, an instrument of power, the article recasts the evolution and mutation of Boko Haram in light of how the group weaponizes transportation/mobility, and how it interacts with differently and differentially mobile others. This article should be seen as a first attempt to insert the subject of (auto)mobility into the rapidly growing literature on Boko Haram, contributing to our meagre understanding of how movement and stasis influences the group’s tactics and choice of targets. It brings together qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, media reports, and hours of observations at roadblocks and control posts operated by a local security assemblage of police officers, paramilitaries, and soldiers.