By Charli Carpenter | Two weeks ago, in a startling move, President Donald Trump said he had ordered the Pentagon to begin plans for a military intervention in Nigeria. The ostensible mission was to protect Christian populations from alleged massacres and genocide at the hands of the jihadist militant group Boko Haram. “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” Trump stated. | The day prior, at Trump’s behest, the State Department had labeled Nigeria a “country of particular concern” with regard to religious freedom, further framing the violence in Nigeria as a clash between Muslims and Christians. Yet this identity-based narrative is simplistic, even if the insurgent threat to Nigerians is real. Boko Haram has been terrorizing civilians in Nigeria’s northeast as well as in the neighboring countries of Niger and Chad since 2009, creating a festering humanitarian crisis around Lake Chad. Throughout its history, Boko Haram has used horrific methods of extortion, kidnapping, rape, torture and massacres to secure its territorial base and undermine stability in Nigeria. | But as WPR’s editor-at-large Judah Grunstein noted, Boko Haram mainly operates in Nigeria’s Muslim-majority northeast rather than the largely Christian south. Credible sources, such as the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data monitoring group, show that many of the group’s attacks—like Islamist extremists everywhere—actually target Muslim moderates, not Christians. The recent uptick in violence affecting churches rather than mosques is a small percentage of a widening problem of violence affecting Nigerian civilians of all religious groups. | These patterns of violence appear less targeted at Christians and more like an effort to terrorize Muslim communities into adopting Boko Haram’s stricter view of Islam and recruiting young Muslim men into the group. Beyond this, a significant proportion of all attacks on civilians in Nigeria are the result of banditry rather than organized Boko Haram activity. And in addition to those two threats, Christian-majority farmers in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region have long been involved in violent clashes with largely Muslim Fulani herders in disputes over grazing rights, though these clashes are not necessarily religiously motivated. | As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof points out, if risks to Nigerian civilians have spiked this year, a far clearer and more present danger to Christians as well as those of other faiths is the withdrawal of U.S. foreign aid funding. In 2024, Nigeria was the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid in Africa, with its health and human services sectors heavily dependent on American support. According to an estimate by the Center for Global Development, these aid transfers saved over 270,000 lives per year. In a country that is split roughly equally between Muslims and Christians, a significant number of Christians are now in jeopardy due to the U.S. aid cuts. Restoring that aid, Kristof argues, could be the single most effective way to protect Christians, not to mention all civilians, in Nigeria. | So if Nigerian Christians aren’t facing a genocide, what is driving Trump’s sudden emphasis on violence there? Some of it appears to be an open effort to deflect public attention away from the U.S. failure to stop other widely recognized genocides. These include the situation in Sudan, where the U.S. continues to turn a blind eye to the United Arab Emirates’ funneling of money and arms to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, the group responsible for many of the recent atrocities in the city of El-Fasher; and the situation in Gaza, where the U.S. continues to supply weapons and financial assistance to Israel. On a recent episode of his talk show, pro-Israel comedian Bill Maher referred to the situation in Nigeria, stating, “This is so much more of a genocide attempt than what is going on in Gaza … Where are the kids protesting this?” Whether Trump influenced Maher, or Maher and others echoing this rhetoric influenced Trump, the idea is out there. | But the story is also more complex: Some American advocates for Christians worldwide, such as the advocacy group Open Doors, genuinely view violence against their co-religionists as a neglected humanitarian cause. The work of Open Doors in documenting such violence was cited by Rep. Riley Moore to lobby the Trump administration for a stronger response in Nigeria, though Moore, Sen. Ted Cruz and others have exaggerated the number of attacks and deaths that the group itself reports. Nevertheless, the organization is likely motivated by genuine human rights concerns. | Those concerns may resonate rhetorically with Trump, who has often wrapped himself in Christian symbolism to appeal to a base that very much cares about religious ideals. And these arguments may serve the rhetorical purpose of drawing attention away from Gaza or Sudan, or elevating Christian identity as a driver of U.S. foreign policy. But political science research shows that, historically, emphasizing intra-state identity conflicts restrains U.S. military intervention rather than facilitates it. So it is possible that Trump’s rhetoric here is just that, and won’t lead to action. | Even if Trump is genuinely swayed by the pro-Christian advocacy of Moore, Cruz and others, a critique of that approach has been that concern for religious freedom should extend to all religions, and humanitarian interventions should protect all civilians—not specific groups. It is true that, in practice, discourses of Western humanitarian intervention have historically been wielded on behalf of those like “us” rather than those like the “other”: As political scientist Martha Finnemore documented, the more secular and theoretically impartial Responsibility to Protect, or R2P, doctrine that emerged in the 2000s had its roots in older campaigns from the 19th century often meant to protect co-ethnics or co-religionists. | That legacy persists even today in the “humanitarian” rhetoric sometimes used to justify military incursions, as evidenced by Russia’s rationales for its invasion of Ukraine. Yet current humanitarian norms guard against the use of humanitarian language as a smokescreen for self-serving territorial incursions: Under R2P, real humanitarian interventions are meant to be multilateral missions, not unilateral invasions for identity-based reasons. | Nonetheless, the atrocities against Nigerian civilians of all faiths do deserve international attention alongside other major crises such as Gaza, Sudan and Myanmar. Under the R2P doctrine, violence need not be genocidal or targeted at any specific group in order to merit a global response. Nigeria is a weak state beset by a radical Islamist insurgency, with territories that could be characterized as ungoverned spaces and among the highest levels of violence in any African country. The civilians of Nigeria—whether Muslim, Christian or those practicing others religions—do deserve protection and support, and the R2P doctrine allows the international community to provide it when a state is unwilling or unable to do so itself. | But it is worth remembering that the R2P doctrine is also not just about going in “guns a-blazing.” Armed intervention is the third pillar of the doctrine, formulated as the duty to take collective action—including military action consistent with the United Nations Charter. However, the first two pillars of R2P involve nonmilitary approaches to protection, particularly buttressing the capacity of the state to provide the protection its citizens deserve when it desires to do so but is plagued by incapacity, as in the case of Nigeria. | Measures that could genuinely support the Nigerian state in protecting populations from Boko Haram and other sources of violence could include continued military training and support. But previous heavy-handed counterinsurgency efforts there have often swept up the very civilians they are supposed to protect, making local populations wary of the Nigerian military. In light of this, a reinstatement of nonmilitary aid in the form of medicine, food and community empowerment initiatives to assist in the demobilization, disarmament and reintegration of armed fighters could be of even greater value. | What might help the most would be addressing the root causes of the insurgency: endemic issues of corruption, food insecurity, resource-based conflicts, government instability and lack of opportunity for youth, all of which drive young men into militant groups and all of which have been worsened by Washington’s withdrawal of foreign aid. While many of these issues are beyond U.S. control, the single most effective intervention from the U.S. could be to restore life-saving support for development, democracy and education in Nigeria and surrounding nations, rather than resorting to more violence. | Charli Carpenter is a professor of political science and legal studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, specializing in human security and international law. She tweets at @charlicarpenter. |
|
|