Jihadism’s global connections and its history of losses, defeats and failures combine to make jihadists open to internal debates over the orderings they try to produce. These debates feed into - and are fed from - factionalisation, a feature of jihadism in the Lake Chad Basin as elsewhere. In the Lake Chad Basin as in the Levant, jihadism proposes identity regimes that defy the existing nation-states in the name of the Islamic Umma. The “portability” of jihadist Islam has allowed Shekau’s JASDJ to recruit beyond the borders of Nigeria, and also to connect to global jihadist franchises. But these global connections have been controversial and debated within the group itself, contributing to the 2016 split. Both JASDJ and its rival faction, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), have since struggled to expand territorially beyond the Lake – there seems to be some limits to portability. Also, though JASDJ cannot really be described as tribalistic, it has become tied in complex ways to a specific “terroir”, that of the Buduma tribe. The debates within, and factionalisation of, the Nigerian jihad have also been about technologies of jihadist government. Against Shekau’s initial patrimonial and personalistic regime, ISWAP has drawn on the Islamic State’s experience to bring in legal-rational procedures which owe more to the experience of the Ba’athist states of the Levant than to classical Islam. But that has been controversial, and even as ISWAP has grown in efficiency thanks to bureaucratic rationalisation, JASDJ has found a way to survive.

Admission

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Venue

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Kirchweg 33, 14129 Berlin