Narrations on fragility and resilience in the Sahel paint a picture about the region's inherent ungovernability that lead to consider an endless state-and peace-building process as the most feasible governance solution. Everyday practices of violent entrepreneurship, coalescing with inter-community and land-tenure conflicts, now inform social relations and are transforming moral economies around Lake Chad. While competition over territory suitable for farming, grazing and fishing has intensified, dispute-settlement practices organised by community-level authorities have proven ineffective and lacking the necessary means to respond to the encroachment of a wide range of interests claimed by increasingly powerful actors. Meanwhile, communities organised in self-defence militias are undergoing a process of progressive militarisation that tends to normalise violence and legitimise extrajudicial vigilante justice, further empowering capitalendowed arms suppliers gravitating in the jihadi galaxy, such as the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).

Publisher CEDEJ -Centre d'études et de documentation économiques juridiques et sociales

This paper reconstructs, in a parallel way, the continuous oscillations occurred in the interpretation of the notion of takfīr (excommunication), respectively in Abū Bakr al-Baġdādī’s Islamic State and in its West African province (the latter being in turn an offshoot of the Nigerian group known as “Boko Haram”). The paper combines an analysis of theological discourses as emerging from primary sources, with a sociological reading of the processes of jihadist mobilization. It argues that the continuous oscillations between more and less stringent interpretations of the same theological doctrine, similarly observable in the center and the periphery of the Caliphate, are the result of multiple discursive and strategic imperatives pulling the Ǧihādī-Salafī leadership towards contrasting directions. The “lapsed abode of unbelief” – a notion originally devised by a section of the Caliphate’s scholarly leadership in order to halt the oscillation of the takfīr pendulum – was unable to create an ideological consensus in the global Ǧihādī-Salafī community, showing the degree to which the latter has come to be enmeshed in a complex entanglement between its discursive and strategic needs.

This review essay provides an analysis of three very different publications about one of the deadliest and most complex jihadi‐Salafi organizations in the world today: Nigeria‐based Boko Haram. The essay discusses how the debate around the origins, appeal, and doctrine of Boko Haram and its internal and external structure – a debate dominated by visions rooted in US counter‐terrorism paradigms – will be greatly refreshed by the significant amount of new data and interesting reflections proposed and examined in the three books. Finally, the essay proposes that academics and analysts who focus on Boko Haram should aim to overcome disciplinary boundaries and research compartmentalization in order to develop an effective and all‐encompassing level of knowledge about this organization and the related insurgency.

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