With over 25 books published on Nigeria's violent Islamic insurgency since 2014, one could be forgiven for asking whether we really need yet another book about Boko Haram. Fortunately, this book is not about Boko Haram itself, but about the political and economic pressures driving it and the social and institutional resources within Nigerian society capable of overcoming it. After a decade of failed initiatives to combat the insurgency, there is a pressing need to address pervasive misconceptions about the religious and social realities that gave rise to violent extremism in northern Nigeria, and to gain a better understanding of the forces available for reining it in. The contributors to this collection are seasoned Nigerian and Nigerianist scholars with considerable lived experience in northern Nigeria, and specialized knowledge of the themes on which they write, including the Nigerian military, the Borno factor, the community of Nigerian Islamic scholars, the politics of Niger Republic, women and youth in northern Nigeria, and the Nigerian informal economy. In the field of ‘Boko Haram-ology’, crowded by a few too many instant experts on Islam in Nigeria, the depth of academic as well as cultural and institutional experience that informs this collection should not be under-rated. Locating internal social and religious processes in the context of wider economic and political pressures, the chapters in this volume offer an inside perspective on how this terrible eruption of violence could happen, with a view to seeking more grounded approaches to resolving it.

This book began as a research project commissioned by the Office of the National Security Adviser in Nigeria to produce evidence-based research for the development of a ‘soft approach’ to counter-terrorism. Sometime in late 2013, Raufu Mustapha was contacted by the DfID-funded Nigeria Security and Reconciliation Programme (NSRP) about putting together a research programme on radicalization and counter-radicalization in northern Nigeria. In collaboration with Professor M. Sani Umar of Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, a research team was assembled, drawing on the Oxford-based Nigeria Research Network which Raufu had built up around previous research projects on religion in northern Nigeria.