Description
This study examines how Nigeria’s policymakers represent and construct Boko Haram terrorism, as insecurity, and how this enables certain state actions while excluding other possibilities. It identifies and critiques the contingent character of the discourses that constructs the Nigerian state as an object of, as well as a securitising subject. To be sure, existing scholarship on counter-terrorism in Nigeria have identified the excessive use of militaristic measures, instead of other development-oriented approaches, as essentially problematic. As such, this study builds on this existing literature to offer a broader examination of the warranting conditions and set of floating signifiers that makes such state practices possible, yet unnecessary.
This study is situated within constructivist and poststructuralist scholarship that treat (counter-)terrorism as, fundamentally, discursive construction. This analysis will be carried out by examining 20 official documents, 100 speeches, anti-terrorism legislations, and secondary texts that offers significant insights to the modes of subjectivity and contingencies that constitutes Nigeria’s counter-terrorism policy and practices. It makes a significant contribution by critiquing the various ways in which counter-terrorism is understood and practiced within specific contexts. It also allows for broader discussion on security knowledges and practices that go beyond emancipatory and normative injunctions.
