In April 2014, the terrorist organization Boko Haram kidnapped 276 high school girls in Chibok, a town in northeast Nigeria. About 57 of the girls managed to escape on the night of their capture.
Boko Haram had demonstrated its intentions regarding the education of girls and young women prior to the mass kidnapping — two months before the Chibok kidnapping, Boko Haram attacked a high school in a nearby state, Yobe. The terrorists separated the students by gender, “shot or burned to death” 59 boys and told the girls to “go away and get married and to abandon their education.”
The kidnapping of the Chibok girls reflected Boko Haram’s attitude towards not only education and culture, but also the place and role of women in society.
A new trajectory
The mothers of the 219 kidnapped girls protested, but little attention was generated due to their low socioeconomic status, degree of organization and location. Within three weeks, other more powerful women intervened to advocate for the rescue of the girls. They included Oby Ezekwesili, a two-time federal minister and former vice president of the World Bank.
The #BringBackOurGirls/#BBOG movement emerged from a coalition between elite women and middle-class allies, marking a new trajectory in human rights advocacy led by African women.
The kidnapping of the Chibok girls and the global ascendance of the #BBOG movement is a study in the interplay of human rights advocacy, terrorism and national and geopolitics. My new book, Terrorism, Politics, and Human Rights Advocacy: The #BringBackOurGirls Movement, is the first book-length sociological investigation of the #BBOG phenomenon.
A social problem
The Chibok kidnapping did not instantly garner a high level of attention. Eventually, through careful media strategy, the #BBOG movement turned the Chibok kidnapping into a social problem.
The #BBOG movement used a hybridized communication process that extended beyond hashtags and internet activism. #BBOG engaged in rigorous offline, on-the-ground mobilization and well-co-ordinated protests.
The #BBOG movement originated in Africa and demonstrated how a women-led, non-violent social movement became perceived as a major threat to regime stability.
The Nigerian government attempted to destroy the movement through multiple avenues, such as the intentional creation of chaos, solicitation of leadership change, smear campaigns, unlawful arrests and bomb threats.
(AP Photo/ Gbemiga Olamikan)
Online campaign, offline impacts
The #BBOG movement efficiently influenced political and social change, reflecting the role contemporary, women-led social movements in Africa play in reshaping institutional and non-institutional actions, beliefs and practices. #BBOG contributed to the first electoral defeat of an incumbent president in Nigeria.
The #BBOG deployed four major framing approaches: maternalist (which frames women’s roles as mothers and caregivers as distinctive and important); human rights; girls’ rights to education; and the failure of the state.
The motherist or maternalist framing was used early on to motivate and mobilize women in Nigeria, alongside girls’ rights to education. Soon, highlighting the government’s failure to urgently respond took precedent.
Over time, there was an emphasis on the ineptitude, decadence and
corruption of the Nigerian state and internal decay of the military.
The international attention generated by the framing contributed to a change of regime in Nigeria. The global spread of the #BBOG framing was tactically useful, but turned out to be a strategic error because it alienated powerful key stakeholders. This was because it partly relied on the assumption that foreign governments, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, might help rescue the kidnapped girls.
Military involvement
Armed forces are not always shielded from the political process, particularly in developing countries. Problems in the Nigerian political process and the military inhibited efforts to rescue the Chibok girls. For example, the religious, political and ethnic identities and subjectivities of military officers were exploited by politicians during the 2015 presidential election campaign.
For my book, I interviewed several senior generals, some of whom informed me that delaying the rescue of the Chibok girls was viewed as favourable for the chances of then-opposition candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari. Buhari won the election in 2015.
Other factors within the Nigerian political process and the military made rescuing the Chibok girls and defeating Boko Haram challenging. These included corruption, intelligence leaks, sabotage, nepotism, alienation of the public, shortage of arms and ammunition in some units, inadequate co-ordination of security operations and “strategic blunders” made by political leaders.
Some soldiers perceived the war against Boko Haram as a “rubbish” mission. They felt the war was not only poorly executed, but was being used to the benefit of some senior officers and politicians. This contributed to poor civil–military relations in the war against Boko Haram.
(AP Photo/Jossy Ola)
Involvement of elites
Members of elite groups — those connected to major institutions of society through education, wealth, background, professional and marital ties — became involved in the #BBOG movement. This was a double-edged sword.
The #BBOG elite did bring significant advantages: reputation, media coverage and deep connections to major institutions and entities in society. However, they also inadvertently introduced certain baggage in an environment with weak institutional structures.
The involvement of elites enmeshed #BBOG in an intricate labyrinth of partisan loyalties and individual ambitions. Many of the contradictory ideological leanings, intra-elite squabbles and political ambitions of its leaders pre-date #BBOG, and have had a significant impact on the movement and its outcomes.
As Chibok and the world mark 10 years since the mass abduction, it is worth noting that #BBOG helped ensure the Chibok girls were not forgotten. Most of the girls have returned from captivity, but more than 90 remain missing, and more than 30 parents have died while awaiting the return of their children.
Overall, the #BBOG experience highlights the need for activists — particularly in the Global South — to be clear about what support means for their cause. Generating awareness about a social problem is not necessarily the same as specific, tangible and empirically verifiable action to solve a problem.
Activists should think local and act local in human rights advocacy. There was little practical and visible assistance to rescue the Chibok girls, despite the internationalized framing and global public display of support by heads of states and celebrities.
