Publications

For over a decade, the Boko Haram insurgency in the Lake Chad Basin has caused severe human suffering. Over this period, the strategies of jihadist splinter factions have evolved significantly, profoundly affecting the mobility of populations living in the Lake Chad Basin area. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from Cameroon, Chad and Nigeria, this chapter examines translocal mobility patterns in the borderlands of the Lake Chad Basin. It investigates how mobility dynamics are shaped by the conflict, focusing on two interrelated processes: the movements of people returning to recovered territories and the community tensions that accompany such returns, and the relocation of individuals leaving armed groups. Using a peace and conflict studies perspective, this chapter explores how these processes reconfigure social, political and economic spaces. We argue that armed violence fundamentally (re)shapes translocal lives in the Lake Chad Basin borderlands, emphasising the role of armed group dynamics, structural causes of violence and the responses of governmental and non-governmental actors.

Read the book chapter here.