Dying to Save: Youth Vigilantism, Civilian Joint Task Force, and Counterterrorism in Nigeria

Daniel Agbiboa, George Mason University

Research Grant, 2017

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How do civilian communities in contemporary armed rebellions create order in a context of pervasive insecurity? What are the consequences of civilian self-protection strategies and order-making for violence in general and for the intensity, duration, and termination of armed rebellions in particular? These are the overriding questions that this research project sought to tackle in the context of the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria.

Since 2009, Nigeria and its neighbors in the Lake Chad Basin have been in the throes of a violent insurgency by the Salafi-jihadi group known as Boko Haram, which later merged into Wilayat Garb Ifriquiya (the Islamic State’s West Africa Province, or ISWAP).

In June 2011, as Boko Haram’s drive-by shootings and bombings surged, the Nigerian government deployed a special Joint Task Force (JTF), “Operation Restore Order,” to northeastern Nigeria with the aim of extirpating insurgents from the land. But the JTF’s poor knowledge of the physical and social terrain in which Boko Haram operates made it extremely difficult to build the networks of trust and reciprocity that are key to overcoming an internal enemy.

Dispensing with any efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of the local population, the JTF lumped the local civilian populations into “suspect communities” and, thus, legitimized its use of indiscriminate violence against civilian populations, especially young men.

Dispensing with any efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of the local population, the JTF lumped the local civilian populations into “suspect communities” and, thus, legitimized its use of indiscriminate violence against civilian populations, especially young men. As one local respondent put it: “To the Nigerian military, the locals are ‘Boko Haram’ and to Boko Haram, the locals are traitors.” It is no wonder, then, that at the peak of the Boko Haram insurgency (2010–2013), the JTF is estimated to have killed three times more civilians than Boko Haram. The scorched-earth tactics of the JTF alienated many innocent citizens and hurt chances of any local cooperation. Despite the disbandment of the JTF in 2013, and its replacement with the 7th infantry division as the umbrella command for the war on Boko Haram, indiscriminate attacks on civilians continued to be widespread and extreme. This was the context in which urban vigilante and rural hunter militias—most prominently the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF)—emerged in affected parts of northeast Nigeria with the overriding aim of fighting terror and keeping the peace.

Since its creation in early 2013, the CJTF has mobilized thousands of local youths (both men and women) who have intimate knowledge of the physical and social terrain in which Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgents operate, and who work collaboratively with state security forces and other community-based armed groups. The CJTF’s superior linguistic, topographical, and social skills assisted the Nigerian military with garnering information from local community members and with overcoming the problem of identification (i.e., differentiating between armed insurgents and civilians). As a result, Nigerian soldiers were able to more effectively and selectively target Boko Haram insurgents, thus driving down the level of civilian victimization. The CJTF is widely credited with dislodging Boko Haram insurgents from the city of Maiduguri, the group’s main operational base, in late 2013. 

Among Nigerian vigilante movements, the CJTF is unique in its core focus on counterinsurgency alongside state security forces and in its resolve to prop up rather than withdraw from or even resist the state. That said, while the CJTF’s bravery endeared it to civilian populations and politicians alike—with the Nigerian government hailing its members as “new national heroes”—growing and credible evidence of the group’s human rights abuses calls for a sober reflection on the role and contributions of militias to African counterinsurgencies.

This research project was, at heart, an effort to understand how local communities in conflict sustained a sense of order and agency in the face of insecurity. It drew richly on qualitative fieldwork conducted in three of the most adversely affected states in northeast Nigeria, namely, Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states. 

The rise of vigilante and hunter militias in the context of state counterinsurgency offers an opportunity to go beyond the conventional focus on the local state to understand the hybrid nature of security governance in African rebellions. Furthermore, the voices and experiences of those who live daily with violence are a window into the social resilience and agency of local populations amid disempowering circumstances. By analyzing the role and contributions of militias in counterinsurgency, this research demonstrated that civilian populations are not passive victims of war, but instead adapt in a variety of ways to impose order and predictability on their dangerous environments. This project therefore expanded and complemented the growing corpus of works on the complex role of militias vis-a-vis the state and the community in a context of armed rebellion. Specifically, it highlighted the crucial role of civil-military cooperation for overcoming Salafi-jihadi groups such as Boko Haram and reducing state violence against local populations. At the same time, the project underscored the precarious nature of civilian self-protection tactics, both in terms of increasing the violent targeting of innocent civilians by vengeful insurgents as well as the tendency for militias to go rogue and become existential threats to the local communities they were expected to protect.

Moreover, much has been written about women in African conflicts as victims and violent perpetrators. Less well understood is their active role as counterinsurgents and local vanguards. This project shed new light onto the gendered practices of counterinsurgency in northeast Nigeria, with particular attention to why women joined the war on Boko Haram and what role they played in the civilian resistance to the Salafi-jihadi group. The research found that women joined the war for a variety of reasons, including personal losses, family ties, community attachment (a sense of belonging), a desire to protect vulnerable members of their community (especially women), a deep sense of patriotic loyalty, and a yearning for normality. The project not only brings female counterinsurgents out of the shadows of male counterinsurgents and female insurgents (e.g., suicide bombers), but extends the extant literature beyond the narrow fixation with women’s participation in rebel groups and women as “weapons of terror.”

Finally, the rise of progovernment militias such as vigilante and hunter groups in the context of northeast Nigeria highlights the need for a new analytical framework that empirically and theoretically engages hybrid security governance in the context of African counterinsurgencies. Weak states are ordinarily not in a position to provide security and other political goods on their own. Given their local embeddedness and the popular legitimacy that they seem to enjoy, at least in the early phases, militias may be well-placed to carry out basic governance duties, establish public norms of compliance and cooperation with locals, and provide order and dispute-resolution services. The fusing of a nonstate armed group—volunteering to shield their community from insurgents—into an institution of legitimate violence underscores the limitations of conventional state/society dichotomies in analyses of how civilians imagine and encounter the state. In particular, it breaks down our normative understanding of state-civil society distinctions, and it collapses the traditional understanding of the state as the Leviathan possessing exclusive right to legitimate violence.