Founded more than 10 years ago, Boko Haram, the extremist group in northern Nigeria, jolted into global consciousness with the abduction of nearly 300 girls in April, 2014. Since, stories about the communities affected by its terrorizing tactics, about the regional effort to fight it, and about a new President who promised to put a final end to it, have ebbed and flowed in and out of international headlines.
In this series, a partnership between OpenCanada.org and the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) at Concordia University, we take you back to Nigeria. We turn our attention back to the human rights researchers who are using satellite images to document the group’s activity; back to the challenges that lay ahead for President Buhari, including meeting the needs of the internally displaced; back to the composition of this complex group — fanatics whose ranks are nearly half made up of children.
With essays from Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, International Crisis Group’s EJ Hogendoorn, Amnesty’s Christoph Koettl, journalist Tolu Ogunlesi, Shelly Whitman of the Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, and Marie Lamensch and Nicolai Pogadl with MIGS, we bring you six different ways to gain a better understanding of a crisis that deserves to stay front of mind.
