BY PATRICIA TAFT AND NATE HAKEN Borno State, the location of the April 2014 abduction of nearly 300 school girls, is at the heart of what has been called the “Boko Haram” insurgency. The insurgency, perpetrated by a militant group called Jamāʻat Ahl as-Sunnah lid-daʻwa wal-Jihād (JAS), began in 2009 as a mass uprising against […]
Category Archives: Nate Haken
Conflict Bulletin: Edo State – November 2013
- 14 November 2013
BY NATE HAKEN Conflict Bulletin: Edo State – November 2013 Edo state is in the south of Nigeria, located next to Delta and Ondo states in the Niger Delta region. It has a total population of about 3.2 million people, according to current estimates. The primary ethnic groups are the Edos, Bini, Owan, Esan, and […]
Conflict Bulletin: Rivers State – August 2013
- 21 August 2013
BY NATE HAKEN* Rivers, among the largest of the oil-producing Nigerian states, had been at the heart of the Niger Delta militancy until 2009. Now it is beset with a different array of issues as former combatants have turned to criminality, and uneven economic development continues to pose a challenge to sustainable peace and human […]
Failed States Index 2013: The Book
- 24 June 2013
BY J.J. MESSNER, NATE HAKEN, KRISTA HENDRY, PATRICIA TAFT, KENDALL LAWRENCE, SEBASTIAN PAVLOU, FELIPE UMANA The Failed States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of […]
The Dark Side of State Building: South Sudan
- 24 June 2013
BY NATE HAKEN AND PATRICIA TAFT For sustainable human security, statebuilding is the only endgame. Absent the state, traditional mechanisms and authority structures might indeed manage communal issues, perhaps even better than would the state. Trans-communal issues like environmental degradation, complex humanitarian emergencies, and large scale conflict, however, go beyond the jurisdiction and capacity of […]
Anatomy of a Storm: Regional Impacts of the Arab Spring
- 24 June 2013
BY NATE HAKEN Does state failure matter? Obviously it matters mostly for the population of that country, but even for its neighbors, the answer is a resounding yes. Chaos in a single country can often impact an entire region. In 2011, as measured in the 2012 FSI, Tunisia and the wider “Arab Spring” were the […]
State of Emergency in Nigeria: Balancing Hard Security with Peacebuilding
- 29 May 2013
BY NATE HAKEN AND BENJAMIN KAUFMAN On 15 May 2013, President Goodluck Jonathan imposed a state of emergency in three states in northeastern Nigeria. In a televised statement, he called for “extraordinary measures to restore normalcy” in Borno, Yobe and Adawama states, where the domestic non-state armed group(s) Jama’atu Ahlus-Sunnah Lidda’Awati Wal Jihad (JAS), commonly […]
Peacebuilding Through Local Mediation
- 06 March 2013
BY NATE HAKEN Conflict can devastate the livelihoods of people in the affected communities. But the story of the Ekowe community shows how local mediation efforts can make a big difference for peace in the Niger Delta. The footage for this video was filmed courtesy of the Rural Empowerment Foundation and facilitated by NIDPRODEV/LITE AFRICA. […]
Nigeria: Beyond Terror and Militants
- 10 December 2012
BY NATE HAKEN, FILIPA CARREIRA, ELIZAVETA EGOROVA, RACHEL HERSH Not every explosion in northern Nigeria stems from the radicalism of Boko Haram. Nor is every outbreak of violence in the Niger Delta the result of militants fighting over oil revenues. Rather, violence in its different forms is an expression of a broader and deeper fabric […]
Turning the Page on Charles Taylor
- 08 November 2012
BY KENDALL LAWRENCE, NATE HAKEN, PATRICIA TAFT AND NORA LOCASAR On April 26, 2012, the International Criminal Court convicted Liberia’s former president Charles Taylor for his role in the commission of crimes against humanity during the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. For Sierra Leone, this brought a dark chapter to a close — […]