全球智库信息集成服务系统

Introduction

In 2019, the conflict in northeastern Nigeria entered its eleventh year. Since 2009, the Boko Haram insurgency and the government’s military response have killed tens of thousands of civilians and displaced millions across the Lake Chad region, which straddles Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria. Although major military campaigns in 2015–2016 succeeded in degrading the group’s territorial control, Boko Haram has proven remarkably adaptable in its tactics: the end of 2018 once again saw an uptick in attacks in Nigeria’s Borno State.¹ As Muhammadu Buhari assumes his second term as president, the conflict in the northeast appears far from resolved.

Since the early years of the crisis, Nigeria’s international partners have cautioned that Boko Haram is unlikely to be defeated on the battlefield alone. They have stressed the need for a multidimensional response that tackles the drivers of insecurity in the region, including chronic weaknesses in service delivery, corrupt governance, and environmental degradation. However, the perception of limited leverage over Nigerian counterparts, restricted access to the country’s northeast, and a response to the crisis shaped by the U.S.-led Global War on Terror limited donors’ focus on these governance dimensions on the ground. In practice, international assistance came late and donors struggled to identify viable national counterparts for stabilization programs. As a result, their efforts centered on supporting regional military efforts and responding to the large-scale humanitarian crisis.

Since early 2017, military gains and improved security in parts of northeastern Nigeria have spurred a greater focus on conflict stabilization measures. At the international level, key donors set up the Oslo Consultative Group on the Prevention and Stabilization in the Lake Chad Region to coordinate their response activities. The Lake Chad Basin Commission and the African Union Commission have adopted a regional stabilization strategy, which highlights short-, medium-, and long-term stabilization, resilience, and recovery needs.² In parallel, donors have also begun expanding bottom-up stabilization programs aimed at addressing the drivers of insecurity at the local level. These efforts have generally fallen into three main categories: programs aimed at strengthening local conflict prevention and mitigation systems, programs aimed at restoring local governance and basic services, and programs aimed at fostering social cohesion and ensuring the reintegration of former combatants.

This paper provides an overview of these local-level efforts and the theories of change that undergird them.³ It highlights initial lessons learned by donors and implementers, as well as persistent tensions between local-level program objectives and higher-level political and conflict dynamics. Most stabilization programs were designed with the assumption that the security situation in northeastern Nigeria would continue to improve, thereby facilitating the gradual return of displaced populations and local government. Yet in practice, Nigeria’s overstretched, under-resourced, and corruption-plagued military has struggled to consolidate its gains. Civilians in many parts of the northeast face ongoing threats from both insurgent attacks as well as counterterrorism operations. Rampant corruption and ineffective coordination have hampered the Nigerian government’s civilian response to the crisis, with various federal, state, and local elites benefiting from the continuation of the crisis. Moreover, while international partners stress the need for a regional response to the crisis, the region lacks an effective political infrastructure, and cooperation has been primarily externally driven.

The Nigerian case thus exemplifies the difficulties of implementing effective local-level stabilization efforts while working with a host government that lacks political commitment, transparency, and coordination. While local-level programs have shown positive impacts in various areas, they have struggled to gain wider traction—particularly since donors are often working through or dependent on the government to operate.

• Well-designed conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms have proven effective at the local level, yet they are difficult to scale up. Such programs have helped address local security threats and have improved dialogue between citizens, security services, and the state. Yet to date, efforts to connect these platforms to higher-level political institutions and change top-down decisionmaking have been relatively unsuccessful. As a result, these mechanisms struggle to tackle conflict drivers and structural problems that go beyond the capacity of local governments, including chronic corruption and weak accountability and oversight in the security sector.

• Donor programs have helped restore basic infrastructure and services, but the political end goals of stabilization programming are more uncertain. Some aid providers found that small-scale efforts to bring back local government proved insufficient to address long-standing perceptions of neglect, and shifted to circumventing the government by providing services directly to communities and individuals deemed at risk of extremist recruitment. Other programs combine reconstruction with community-based development, with the aim of improving bottom-up participation in service delivery. Yet systemic governance shortcomings, particularly the lack of local political accountability and weak state incentives to prioritize service delivery, present significant hurdles that need to be addressed in long-term program planning and design.

• Efforts to reintegrate individuals affiliated with violent extremist groups have multiplied, though they remain stifled by the Nigerian government’s militarized conflict response. Donors have supported the development of a national framework for demobilization, deradicalization, rehabilitation, and reintegration (DDRR) and funded local-level reintegration initiatives. However, the military maintains tight control over the screening and vetting of terrorism suspects, a process that lacks transparency and is not subject to civilian oversight. Many detainees have been held for years, despite little to no evidence of ties to violent extremist groups. While a small-scale defectors program exists, it needs to be expanded and to adopt a much more comprehensive focus on reintegration and community consultation in order to be effective. These shortcomings also highlight the need for continued high-level pressure for greater security sector transparency and accountability.

Tracing the International Response

Evolution of the Crisis

In the early years of the conflict, most Western governments saw Boko Haram primarily as a problem specific to Nigeria. The group first emerged as an Islamic reform movement in the northeastern town of Maiduguri in the early 2000s. Its members followed the charismatic Salafi preacher Muhammad Yusuf, who condemned Western-style education and corrupt, secular governance while also cultivating strategic ties to the city’s elites. In 2009, clashes between Boko Haram members and police forces escalated into several days of armed uprising in Maiduguri.⁴ The Nigerian government brutally crushed the insurrection, leaving several hundreds dead—including Yusuf himself, who was executed in police custody. The subsequent evolution of the conflict can be roughly divided into three main phases.

Emergence of guerilla warfare and an ineffective initial response (2010–2012)

Following the government’s crackdown, Nigerian authorities believed they had successfully quashed the movement.⁵ Yet Boko Haram re-emerged in 2010 under the leadership of Abubakar Shekau, carrying out sporadic attacks across the northeast.⁶ Its clandestine tactics gradually grew more sophisticated, but the Nigerian government was slow to recognize the extent of the crisis. Then president Goodluck Jonathan instead framed Boko Haram as a terrorist organization with ties to international jihadist networks, thereby laying the ground for a narrow counterterrorism response.⁷ After some internal debate, both the UK and the U.S. governments followed suit in declaring Boko Haram a foreign terrorist organization. While this designation had little immediate effect on the ground, it weakened the possibility of a political solution to the escalating conflict.⁸ It has also significantly complicated U.S. assistance for reintegration programs in recent years.

Expanding territorial control and military setbacks (2013–2014)

In 2013, the Nigerian military intensified its campaign against Boko Haram. Yet its indiscriminate tactics failed to degrade the group’s capacity and deeply alienated the region’s civilian population. A state of emergency imposed on Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa States only deepened the cycle of violence. In high-level statements and meetings, both the U.S. and European governments stressed the need to improve civilian protection and address the root causes of violence.⁹ Despite these warnings, Jonathan pushed for more security assistance while downplaying the degree of dysfunction within the Nigerian military and the worsening humanitarian crisis.¹⁰ As a result, the bilateral relationship between the United States and Nigeria deteriorated.

In April 2014, Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 276 female students from the town of Chibok made worldwide headlines, drawing greater policy attention to the crisis. Several Western governments—including the United States—offered technical assistance and intelligence-sharing to help find the girls. The U.S. State Department formed a Nigeria Planning and Operations Group that brought together technical and regional experts as well as a military liaison to plan and coordinate rapid responses to the crisis. However, concerns over human rights abuses by Nigerian security forces hampered greater cooperation, even as Boko Haram expanded its control of the northeastern countryside.¹¹

Increasingly concerned about Boko Haram’s threat to regional stability, the United States as well as France and the UK began shifting their focus to Nigeria’s neighbors. Various U.S. agencies began pushing for greater military cooperation between the Lake Chad countries, and the United States leveraged the Global Security Cooperation Fund and the Counterterrorism Partnership Fund to increase security assistance to Cameroon, Chad, and Niger.¹² This shift allowed the U.S. government to support military efforts against Boko Haram while circumventing the policy hurdles associated with direct aid to the Nigerian government. In parallel, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched several smaller-scale stabilization efforts aimed at increasing community resilience to violent extremism in the wider Lake Chad region.¹³

Regionalization and return to clandestine tactics (2015–present)

In early 2015, in the midst of Nigeria’s election season, a renewed military offensive began making headway against the group. After repeated delays, the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNTJF)—a loose coalition of troops from Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria—seized back most of the territory previously held by Boko Haram.¹⁴ Counterinsurgency operations triggered new waves of displacement as civilians were pushed from the countryside into military-controlled camps in urban centers.¹⁵ Yet the involvement of neighboring countries also sparked an increasing regionalization of the crisis and further militarization of the conflict response. With Buhari’s inauguration in May 2015, relations between the Nigerian government and Western partners improved, opening the door to increases in Western security assistance—including the deployment of U.S. and British military advisers and the sale of light attack aircraft in 2017.

Over the past three years, Boko Haram’s decline has been uneven. As the insurgents were pushed back into more remote rural areas, they reverted to earlier tactics, relying on guerilla-style attacks and suicide bombings.¹⁶ Nigerian security forces have struggled to consolidate control over rural areas and protect urban centers from sporadic attacks. While the number of fatalities associated with the group has declined, the number of attacks has fluctuated, and patterns of violence have remained largely consistent since 2014.¹⁷ The group has splintered into two main factions or cells: a larger faction led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi now brands itself as the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), while Abubakar Shekau still commands a group of militants under the group’s previous name, Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS). Over the course of 2018, ISWAP appears to have expanded its reach in northern Borno, reportedly even recapturing a number of towns near Lake Chad previously controlled by the Nigerian military.¹⁸ While some areas—particularly in Adamawa State, Yobe State, and southern Borno—have thus seen greater security and the return of displaced populations, other parts of Borno State still struggle with ongoing military operations and humanitarian crisis conditions.

The International Response Comes Late

The donor community on the ground in Nigeria was late to acknowledge the severity of the crisis, and slow to scale up its response. Several factors explain this pattern. First, in the early years of the crisis, international partners were hesitant to push back against Nigerian authorities’ assurances that the conflict response was under their control. In contrast to other conflict-affected states, the Nigerian government wields significant resources and regional power, resulting in a greater stature vis-a-vis international partners. Donor governments thus prioritized working through Nigerian government structures rather than sidestepping local authority, even as bureaucratic obstruction, a lack of committed interlocutors, and in-fighting between different levels of government slowed down the response.¹⁹

Second, donor states and the United Nations (UN) had little political interest in declaring the region a large-scale emergency, which would have required additional commitments of resources in an already crisis-ridden international context.²⁰ For example, in 2014–2015, UN leadership in the country did little to press for greater international involvement, despite evidence of worsening conditions in the northeast. Western capitals, already preoccupied with crises in Iraq, South Sudan, and Syria, in turn saw Nigeria as a resource-rich country with less need for international aid.²¹ Those donors already present in Nigeria prior to the crisis had mostly specialized in development programs in areas such as health and education, which often relied on close collaboration with Nigerian authorities. Few had a direct presence in the northeast, and those that did worked via partnerships with smaller local groups. However, the scale of these efforts was far below the level of need.²² These dynamics further delayed the transition to a comprehensive conflict response.²³

Lastly, the deteriorating security situation and lack of communication lines with Boko Haram limited access and made it difficult to obtain accurate assessments of the rapidly evolving crisis. Beginning in 2013, the state of emergency in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa States severely restricted mobility and communication flows in the region. Even as the military began pushing Boko Haram into retreat in 2015, continued insecurity prevented the return of civilian administration, and access beyond Maiduguri remained tightly controlled by the Nigerian military.²⁴ Despite this difficult context, several donors launched small-scale peacebuilding and countering violent extremism (CVE) programs in the northeast, generally centered on Maiduguri. Yet persistent security concerns and access restrictions prevented a rapid scale-up.

Only in mid-2016 did reporting on widespread starvation in Bama, a town in northeastern Borno, trigger a radical increase in the overall donor response.²⁵ International aid organizations thus reached many areas more than a year after they had been retaken by Nigerian military forces. They found people living in devastating conditions, with little access to food or basic supplies.²⁶ Most initial efforts prioritized delivering emergency humanitarian assistance to the newly accessible areas. For example, USAID ramped up humanitarian assistance in Nigeria “from virtually nothing in 2014 to $291 million committed for fiscal year (FY) 2017.”²⁷

A Contested Shift Toward Stabilization and Early Recovery

As security conditions improved in late 2016 and early 2017, the discourse of both the Nigerian government and its international partners began shifting toward stabilization. The Nigerian government released the so-called Buhari Plan, which outlines its postconflict recovery priorities in the northeast that range from emergency assistance to stabilization and early recovery. A regional stabilization strategy—developed by the African Union and Lake Chad Basin Commission—followed in 2018. Programs aimed at setting the ground for a transition to longer-term development and governance activities began to take shape.²⁸ For example, USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) rolled out initial assessments to learn about people’s perceptions of governance in the northeast and displaced communities’ willingness to return to their home communities, which served as a basis to inform their programming.²⁹ In March 2017, the U.S. government finalized a strategy for countering Boko Haram and ISWAP, which states that the United States seeks to ensure that the Lake Chad basin countries, together with local authorities and international partners, are “able to address specific regional and community-level conditions that are drivers of conflict and that make communities vulnerable to violent extremist groups.”³⁰

Yet this shift toward stabilization has also provoked resistance. Humanitarian aid organizations working in Nigeria have argued that it comes too soon, noting that the conflict is still ongoing and hundreds of thousands of people remain beyond the reach of basic emergency assistance. They fear that the language of stabilization is playing into the hands of Nigerian authorities who are eager to emphasize a return to normality and a shift to long-term development assistance while downplaying ongoing crisis conditions. Over the past year, for example, Nigerian authorities have pushed aggressively for displaced civilians to return to their home communities, while Buhari has repeatedly declared that Boko Haram has been “technically defeated.”³¹ Humanitarian actors warn that a change in donor priorities may lead to aid being allocated based on the Nigerian government’s political priorities rather than civilian needs, thereby leaving vulnerable groups without assistance.³²

The discourse of stabilization itself has been surrounded by conceptual confusion, with different actors using the term to refer to different things. Some donors use the term synonymously with early recovery to describe any activities aimed at supporting the transition from humanitarian aid to long-term development. Others define it more narrowly as encompassing those activities aimed at restoring local governance and state authority. The difference between “stabilization” and “countering violent extremism” also appears unclear in practice, with donors pursuing similar activities under these two headings. These varying uses mirror the broader policy debates surrounding the concept of stabilization, which has long lacked a shared definition and as a result has been used by governments to describe very different approaches.³³

To address this confusion, the U.S. government in 2018 published an interagency Stabilization Assistance Review (SAR), which establishes a U.S. government-wide definition of the term and identifies key principles for effective stabilization operations. The SAR also notes the importance of developing a political strategy that outlines clear and achievable end states for all stabilization operations as well as the underlying core assumptions. In order to narrow the scope of the analysis, this paper adopts the SAR’s definition of stabilization as “an integrated civilian-military process to create conditions where locally legitimate authorities and systems can peaceably manage conflict and prevent a resurgence of violence.”³⁴ This definition mirrors the approach outlined in the outcome document of the High-Level Conference on the Lake Chad Region held in Berlin in September 2018, which states that “stabilization seeks to enable first steps towards reconciliation between parties to the conflict and to establish social and political consensus as a foundation for legitimate political structures and long-term development.”³⁵ The next section takes a closer look at stabilization activities funded in this vein in northeastern Nigeria, focusing specifically on community-based programs that seek to drive change from the bottom-up.

Typology of Local Stabilization Programs

In northeastern Nigeria, donor-funded local stabilization programs have centered on the following priorities:³⁶

• strengthening local- and state-level conflict prevention and community security mechanisms to help communities prevent and solve emerging conflicts and tensions;
• rehabilitating civilian infrastructure and basic services to strengthen government legitimacy and responsiveness to citizen needs; and
• supporting the reintegration of former fighters, civilian militia, and those associated with insurgent groups, as well as local-level social cohesion more broadly, with a long-term view toward social healing and reconciliation.

While these three categories and the associated theories of change outlined below do not capture the full range and nuances of existing programs, they reflect the dominant approaches among major international donors—which, in northeastern Nigeria, include France, Germany, Japan, the UK, the United States, and the European Commission. In practice, programs often combine multiple types of interventions and theories of change within a larger package, based on the idea that coordinated support will result in greater stability and resilience to external threats. Table 1 reviews these activities in greater detail. It does not include the wider set of early recovery and CVE interventions that do not have direct links to local-level political processes, though it recognizes that these efforts are often interlinked on the ground.

Strengthening Local Conflict Prevention and Resolution Mechanisms

First, across the northeast, international donors have identified restoring local-level conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms as a central priority. While programs vary in their design, they are based on the basic theory of change that supporting communities to better articulate their concerns and needs to government officials and security agencies—and training the latter to listen to these concerns—will help ensure more effective responses to local-level threats, build popular trust in security forces, and help manage future tensions and shocks.³⁷

Even before the onset of conflict, citizen trust in formal security forces had eroded due to corruption, inefficiency, and weak accountability. Insufficient coordination between security actors often resulted in delayed and heavy-handed responses to local security threats—a problem not unique to the northeast, but prevalent across Nigeria.³⁸ The insurgency dramatically exacerbated these challenges. The military’s inability to protect civilians in the early years of the conflict generated widespread resentment. Communities accused security forces of targeting the population, collaborating with the insurgents, and prolonging the fighting for financial gain. As Boko Haram has been pushed back, relations between citizens and security forces have improved in some localities. Yet fear and mistrust are still pervasive, and civilians often prefer turning to community militia—such as the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF)—for protection.³⁹

At the same time, the conflict has weakened the authority of traditional and religious leaders, who have historically played central dispute resolution roles. Many left their communities during the conflict; others were deliberately targeted by insurgents for refusing to collaborate. Some community elders have also seen their authority challenged by youth militia formed during the conflict. Together, these developments have created a local leadership vacuum at a time when the risk of land and property-related conflict is particularly high.⁴⁰ Disruptions in grazing routes and decreases in arable land have exacerbated conflicts between farmers and herders, while protracted displacement has caused friction between internally displaced persons (IDPs), returnees, and host communities.

In response, several donors—including the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the European Union (EU), and the U.S. Department of State—have funded “upstream conflict prevention” programs focused on strengthening dialogue and coordination between communities, local authorities, and security actors. Some programs bring together civilians and security personnel to monitor, report, and discuss local security problems and jointly plan responses, and provide training for community leaders and members in peaceful dispute resolution.⁴¹ Others have created permanent forums and information channels across multiple levels of governance. For example, they combine community-level peace monitors tasked with identifying emerging security threats with platforms that bring together key stakeholders at the community or local government area (LGA) level to address these reports. Many include a specific focus on integrating women and girls into discussions of security challenges and improving reporting on gender-based violence. Some programs, including DFID’s Nigeria Stability and Reconciliation Programme (NSRP) and its follow-up, the EU-funded Managing Conflict in North East Nigeria program, also feature state-level forums tasked with tackling challenges that rise beyond the local level. Part of the objective of these programs was to bridge gaps between Nigeria’s multiple and often competing security institutions, including the military, the National Police Service, the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, the Federal Road Safety Corps, and the CJTF.

Restoring Civilian Administration and Services

A second priority area has been the return of basic services and civilian administration to conflict-affected communities. Even before the Boko Haram insurgency, northeastern Nigeria had the lowest human development indicators in the country. Eight years of violence have further devastated the region’s social infrastructure: 45 percent of all health facilities have been destroyed, as well as an estimated 75 percent of all water and sanitation infrastructures; damages to schools have left 2.9 million children without access to education.⁴² Boko Haram specifically targeted local government officials and civil servants, pushing many to seek refuge in Maiduguri or other states. Efforts to address this immense challenge have been guided by several theories of change, resulting in somewhat distinct approaches.

Restoring services to build trust in government

A first theory of change is that restoring local government and basic service delivery will help foster greater citizen trust in government and improve perceptions of state responsiveness. Prevailing accounts of the conflict suggest that government neglect and weak service provision across the northeast were key factors driving community support for Boko Haram.⁴³ The idea that frustration with dysfunctional governance made communities vulnerable to extremist recruitment has led donors to invest in local government infrastructure in conflict-affected areas, particularly in the early years of the international response. For example, in late 2014, OTI refocused its program from radio messaging to a larger effort to help restore civilian government administration and services in LGAs that had been secured by Nigerian security forces.⁴⁴ By rebuilding police stations and other facilities and bringing back civil servants (including judges and police services), the program aimed to tackle the pervasive sense of