Umar Muhammad Muhammad1&Mohd Afandi bin Salleh2
1 & 2Faculty of Law and International Relations,Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, Malaysia
Corresponding Author’s E-mail: abuibtisam10@gmail.com
Abstract
The Boko Haram insurgent group, active in the Lake Chad Basin LBC region posed a complex security challenge to Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon Republics. The increasing number of cross-border attacks and the infiltration of Boko Haram insurgents from Nigeria into the neighbouring countries posed a serious security threat to all the countries involved. Adopting counterinsurgency theory as the framework of analysis, this article investigates and analyses the collective efforts of the affected countries in combating Boko Haram in the LCB region. This qualitative study aimed at contributing to the existing literature on the topic and to close the research gap on the collective approach policies applied by the affected countries. The method applied to collect data was interview method where 20 participants were carefully selected based on knowledge and expertise from 3 different fields namely security, academic and journalism. Data were coded and analysed using ATLAS.ti software to generate themes for coding process. The findings suggest that counterinsurgency measures have seen limited success, attributed to an excessive focus on security actions and insufficient attention to political and economic strategies in addressing the insurgency. The article concludes that to bring an end to the menace of Boko Haram across the affected countries, various stakeholders including governments, NGOs, and foreign nations should include soft approaches in addition to the military approach in dealing with the situation
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