Amid Boko Haram's persistence, an increasinglyspecialized literature emerges

Starting in 2014, a spate of publications on the Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram began to appear in the academic press. These included Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos's and Abdul Raufu Mustapha's two edited volumes, Mike Smith's book Boko Haram: inside Nigeria's unholy war and Virginia Comolli's Boko Haram: Nigeria's Islamist insurgency. More recent efforts include my own Boko Haram: the history of an African jihadist movement and Jacob Zenn's edited collection, Boko Haram Beyond the Headlines: analyses of Africa's enduring insurgency. Increasingly, however, a new wave of books is offering specialized treatments of Boko Haram as opposed to aiming for comprehensive analysis. The three books reviewed here form the core of this new, thematically organized literature. Singly and collectively, they demonstrate both the strengths and the weaknesses of emphasizing one dimension of the group over others.

Hilary Matfess's Women and the War on Boko Haram illuminates gendered aspects of the insurgency and the responses to it. The book also provides some of the most well-developed, three-dimensional portraits of Boko Haram members and former members yet found in print. In terms of sourcing, Matfess's main strength is that she conducted fieldwork in north-eastern Nigeria (particularly Maiduguri), where she spoke with political elites, foreign aid workers, civilian vigilantes, and women, including former (and, in some cases, perhaps still active) female Boko Haram members. After three background chapters–one on Boko Haram, one on the political background to the insurgency, and one on women's lives in northern Nigeria–the book's three core chapters discuss women's roles in the crisis. Of these chapters, the best is Chapter 5, 'Women at war: wives and weapons in the insurgency', where the reader encounters detailed narratives of women's participation in the movement or other interactions with it. Sections such as 'Aisha's least bad option' (pp. 106–7) give a sense of real people making difficult decisions, providing a helpful antidote to the often–caricatured portrayals of Boko Haram and of 'violent extremism' generally.

Scott MacEachern's Searching for Boko Haram takes the reader into northern Cameroon and far into the past. Drawing on more than thirty years of anthropological and archaeological fieldwork in Cameroon and Nigeria, the book moves across millennia. One standout chapter (Chapter 5) discusses banditry and smuggling along the border between north-eastern Nigeria and northern Cameroon, weaving in anecdotes from the author's past archaeological fieldwork and synthesizing a great deal of literature, especially on northern Cameroon, that has previously been underused by researchers who work on Boko Haram. Throughout the book, MacEachern draws parallels–partly illuminating, but also, as discussed below, partly flawed–between Boko Haram and earlier, notorious figures from a century ago in this region, notably Rabih al-Zubayr and Hamman Yaji.

Abdulbasit Kassim and Michael Nwankpa's The Boko Haram Reader, with substantial contributions by David Cook, provides the only sourcebook of Boko Haram statements and propaganda yet available. Given the meticulous and wide-ranging nature of the book, it may also be the only such volume to ever appear in English. Chronologically organized and supplemented with brief commentaries, the book presents translated excerpts (and a few abridged English originals) of key Boko Haram documents and videos. These materials range from the founder's manifesto to Boko Haram's correspondence with foreign jihadists to doctrinal disputes between different Boko Haram leaders under the shadow of the Islamic State's distant gaze. Although some of these sources are well known among researchers, others have been rescued from obscurity, such as several early videos...