Armed Banditry, Nigerian State, and the Politics of Framing Terrorism

Abstract

Nigeria, as a state, is bedevilled with burgeoning security challenges, culminating in the proscription and declaration of five organizations as terrorist groups. But while the declaration of two such groups (Boko Haram and Ansaru) as terrorist organizations was less controversial, those of the other two (Indigenous People of Biafra [IPOB] and Islamic Movement in Nigeria [IMN]) attracted an avalanche of opprobrium. This was because some Nigerians debated the potency and patterns of threat the aforementioned groups posed to the Nigerian state within extant criminal and terrorism laws. However, the last declared terrorist group, armed bandits, was most violent, destructive, brutal, and generally considered a more significant threat to the country, yet attracted only a mid-level threat framing from state actors. So why did it take the Nigerian state more years to frame the armed bandits as a terrorist group, even with their level of violence and criminality? To answer this question, the chapter, anchoring on the constructivist and rationalist approaches to threat framing and drawing from secondary sources, sets out to (i) explore political contexts to the delayed declaration of the armed bandits, as against the four other groups, as a terrorist organization, (ii) trace the trends in the framing of the armed bandits as a threat by agents of the Nigerian state, and (iii) explore existing theories on why the armed bandits were considered to be less of a national threat but the hitherto proscribed groups.