The world is in the throes of an existential calamity brought on by climate change. While the physical impacts of global warming are frightening, so too are the social and political aspects of adaptation, which can take reactionary and repressive forms. In his infamous 2002 ‘Letter to America’, Osama bin Laden criticized the US for its contribution to climate change (Bodetti, 2019). He wrote, ‘You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries’ (The Guardian, 2002). In 2017, the Afghan Taliban critiqued the US intervention in Afghanistan for the environmental destruction that it wrought, stating, ‘The US invasion destroyed many sectors of Afghanistan, including the environment, in a very bad way and for the long term. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has the perfect plan for environmental protection through planting trees’ (Bodetti, 2017). In Somalia in 2018, Al-Shabaab banned plastic bags because they pose ‘a serious threat to the well-being of humans and animals alike’ (Dahir, 2018). It is no longer possible to avoid interacting with the discourses and materiality of our current ecological crisis. Unfolding globally, it is devastating ecosystems, killing human and non-human life, decimating livelihoods, destroying infrastructure, stressing national political economies, and more (Eklöw & Krampe, 2019: 4). From politicians to far-right groups to ordinary citizens, everyone is reacting to these changes. Violent insurgent groups are also joining the conversation in unprecedented and peculiar ways. While the protection of nature is a part of the rhetoric of some militant Islamist movements, other groups take advantage of the consequences of climate change. Most notably, in Nigeria, Boko Haram has used the dwindling Lake Chad as a weapon of war.

Violent militant Islamist movements have emerged as major political contenders across the world. In tandem, ecological crises are intensifying in their urgency. Both are transforming and redefining the security landscape, creating significant implications for global peace and security. But how, when and why do they intersect? This chapter addresses this question through a case study of Boko Haram in Lake Chad, an epicentre of climate catastrophe. The conflict has reached such troubling magnitudes that the World Food Programme declared it a Level 3 emergency, stating ‘The Sahel is a tragic masterclass in how violence and extreme weather feed into each other’ (WFP, 2020). I conceptualize the nexus of climate change and militant Islamist violence as consisting of an array of interacting geopolitical, socio-economic, ecological and discursive components. Specifically, the Capitalocene, colonialism, neoliberalism and the social hierarchies of class/race/gender/ethnicity/religious co-determine the climate change–militant Islamism matrix in nonlinear, nondeterministic and complex ways (Chalecki, 2001). Dominant media, policy and academic discourses contribute to this assemblage by offering analyses that suffer from a racist and Islamophobic schema that renders the crisis ahistorical and depoliticized. This chapter critically reviews this literature and offers a re-reading of the crisis that considers the social, political, economic and ecological elements of the crisis. I argue this nexus is a political puzzle that must be understood as the historically specific expression of the contradictions of the Capitalocene.

I highlight two major mechanisms of the effect of climate on militant Islamism: first, climate change exacerbates violent conflicts surrounding natural resources. Water scarcity has allowed Boko Haram to weaponize the access and use of Lake Chad to carry out its religio-political agenda. Secondly, climate change is intensifying precarity, making affected populations more vulnerable to recruitment by militant Islamist groups because they offer alternative livelihoods that coincide with their political and socio-economic grievances. This cumulatively provides a fertile ground for insurgent groups to increase their membership and access to valuable resources, making it more viable for them to achieve their objectives. The argument develops in four parts: the first section examines whether Boko Haram can be classified as a far-right movement; the second part sketches the contours of the Lake Chad conflict; the third portion assesses the existing literature; and the fourth section analyses Boko Haram's weaponization of Lake Chad in its struggle to establish an Islamic caliphate in Nigeria. I conclude by outlining an agenda for further research.

Boko Haram – terrorism or far-right populism?

Boko Haram is a militant Islamist movement that emerged in Nigeria's Muslim-majority North. Boko Haram turned into a violent anti-state insurgent movement in 2009 with the explicit aim of toppling the secular state and implementing a Salafist Islamic caliphate (Ekhomu, 2019). A majority of the scholarly and mdia analyses have examined the group through the terrorism/War on Terror lens that focuses on Boko Haram's anti-state and anti-Western motivations, explaining its existence through the prism of the ‘mad Muslim terrorist’ (Patel, 2014: 202). These discourses are grounded in an orientalist binary between the civilizational and racial superiority of the West versus the inferiority of the barbarous East, in which the

Such discourses decontextualize these groups from their complex political, economic and social contexts, consequently obscuring decades of Western colonial and imperial intervention that engender varying degrees of violent and non-violent resistance. Given that the ‘mad Muslim terrorist’ cannot be rational, it becomes possible to reject engaging with their actions, like suicide bombing, in a political manner as acts of resistance (Patel, 2014). This resistance is perceived to be a threat to the white political economic order, and thus it can only be cured by the civility of the West through either indefinite incarceration and torture or total elimination, ultimately giving imperialist nations moral superiority and legitimizing imperial policies (Edwards, 1989: 655; Patel, 2014: 212).

In stark contrast, discourses on the far right in the Global North take seriously the ideological, political and economic underpinnings of far-right populism and violence. These narratives portray white people as rational, complex and imperfect beings whose actions can be understood in relation to the broader social landscape in which they emerge – a privilege denied to the ‘mad Muslim terrorist’ from the Global South. Interestingly, organizations from the Global South are often overlooked within conventional far-right discourses, which are premised on the Eurocentric, orientalist and racist assumption that the ‘normal’ Global North is undergoing certain ‘abnormal’ changes that create far-right populism, while the possibility of such changes in the Global South is not addressed because within the ‘always-assumed-to-be-uncivilized, the undeveloped [Global South], the question of “abnormality” is always foreclosed’ (Masood and Nisar, 2020: 163). It is thus no coincidence that terrorism studies overwhelmingly focus on movements from the Global South, whereas far-right discourses exclusively examine the Global North. Calling one form of reactionary violence, militant Islamism, terrorism but not considering another form, right-wing extremist violence, as terrorism is an inherently political position, which reveals prejudicial assumptions held about the nature of terrorism and terrorists (van Elk, 2016: 153). Classifying the Boko Haram crisis as one of terrorism rather than the far right implies that the ‘far right’ is an aberration in the Global North deserving of its own analytical category, but it constitutes ‘regular politics’ in the Global South. Such frameworks inevitably lead to neoliberal technocratic and militarized solutions that do not combat the root causes, and, in many cases, worsen the violence.

There is budding literature that points to how the far right and militant Islamism are two sides of the same coin, phenomena with shared driving forces – the Capitalocene (Jarvis, 2022; Buckingham & Alali, 2020; Bakali, 2019). The Global Network on Extremism and Technology (Wegener, 2020), a major research institution dedicated to the study of far-right violence, points to the connections between the far-right and militant Islamist movements: dissatisfaction with the socio-economic consequences of neoliberalism; monolithic nationalist identity; xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment; a claim to speak for ordinary citizens whose interests are no longer well represented by traditional politics; patriarchal domination; anti-democratic/anti-state tendencies; distrust of mainstream and government media, and a need to establish their own media networks to disseminate their ideology; and religious antagonism and a call for a return to ‘tradition’ (Gusterson, 2017: 210; Masood & Nisar, 2020: 167). In a project of experimentation, I analyse Boko Haram through the lens of the far right, as a movement rooted in an alienated and oppressed populace and a religious ideology that is capable of articulating its grievances. The Capitalocene assemblage, explored in section four, demonstrates how similar structural processes that are stoking far-right violence across the Western world are the same ones shaping militant Islamist violence in Africa and beyond.

The anatomy of the Lake Chad crisis

In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cautioned that land, which provides the ‘food, feed, fibre, fuel, and freshwater’ that humanity needs to survive, is under threat from rising global temperatures that are causing unprecedentedly high rates of water scarcity. This is acutely felt in Africa, where the temperature is increasing 1.5 times faster than the global average, causing a sharp decrease in available freshwater (Nett & Rüttinger, 2016: 24). Populations that live in drylands, like in the African Sahel, are exposed to extreme risks like water stress, drought and desertification, and habitat degradation (Carbon Brief, 2019). Nigeria is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world (Fasona & Omojola, 2005: 5). The IPCC has found that it is losing an estimated 35,000 square kilometres of agricultural lands to desertification, coupled with drastic reductions in rainfall (Werz & Conley, 2012: 21). This is troubling because agriculture comprises approximately 22 per cent of its gross domestic product and 35 per cent of employment (World Bank, 2021; FAO, 2020). Environmental degradation threatens the livelihoods of around 40 million people, who now face unemployment and poverty (Ojoye, 2016).

Lake Chad is at the centre of this ecological crisis. A transboundary zone that borders four countries – Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger – it was once Africa's second-largest wetland and fourth-largest lake, and it was the sixth-largest lake in the entire world, with a surface area of about 25,000 square kilometres (Gao et al., 2011). It lies in an endorheic basin on the southern margin of the Sahara Desert, making it a primary source of freshwater for drinking, sanitation, fishing and irrigation for the production of staple commodities such as cotton, rice and maize (Owonikoko & Momodu, 2020: 1305). The lake fluctuates seasonally because it is shallow and flat, only reaching a depth of 7 metres, making it sensitive to desertification and precipitation variability (Rizzo, 2015: 13). Coe and Foley (2001) and Gao et al. (2011) report that since the early 1960s, rainfall over the basin has decreased significantly at the same time that irrigation has increased dramatically, negatively impacting the lake's biomass recovery rates. As a result, the lake has shrunk by roughly 90 per cent over 35 years, reaching its lowest point in 2004 at 532 square kilometres (Rizzo, 2015: 14). In 2003, the United Nations (UN) classified the lake as one of the ten most water-impoverished regions in the world (UNEP, 2018). Hydrological and biophysical changes arising from climate change have contributed to the degradation of pasturelands, reduction in the livestock population, 60 per cent decline in fish stocks, loss of vegetation, and depletion of grazing land (Nett & Rüttinger, 2016; Gao et al., 2011).

The drastic reductions in water supply, quality and accessibility have critical social, economic and political consequences (Okpara et al., 2017). The social effects of climate change depend on the adaptive capacity of economic, cultural and political systems (Buhaug et al., 2015: 2). Lake Chad operates in a degree of lawlessness because the Nigerian state lacks the human, technical and administrative control to manage water scarcity (Okpara et al., 2017: 311). In the absence of social safety nets, climate change has generated continuous cycles of mass migration, poverty, food insecurity, unemployment and more (Owonikoko & Momodu, 2020: 1302). In this chaos, contestations over the control of water emerge, as insurgent groups, who are vying for state power, use the shrinking sources of water as a ‘political tool, a material source of power, a weapon during wars and a means of violence’ to advance their interests (Daoudy, 2020: 1349). In parallel to the deteriorating ecological conditions, a crisis of insurgency is also erupting in Lake Chad – perpetrated by Boko Haram (Nett & Rüttinger, 2016).

In 2015, Boko Haram expanded into the Lake Chad region, gaining control over the dwindling water source and establishing itself as the premier political authority (Maza et al., 2020: 8). The lawlessness of the basin has provided the group with a safe haven to protect itself from attacks by the Nigerian military (Comolli, 2017). Designated as the world's deadliest terrorist group in 2015 by the Global Terrorism Index, Boko Haram has taken the lives of over 31,000 people since 2011 in the Lake Chad region through abductions, suicide bombings, assassinations and beheadings (Global Terrorism Index, 2015; Watts, 2004: 2). Boko Haram's control over the basin has allowed it to operate more freely in the region. It is estimated that the group has destroyed approximately 75 per cent of the water infrastructure in the Northeast in an attempt to control the surrounding population (Ekhomu, 2019: 141). For example, it has been known to poison valuable water sources, like wells and streams, used by the military during their counter-terrorism missions near and around the basin as a means to deter them from further encroaching into the lake (Nett & Rüttinger, 2016: 15). This has made the water dangerous for humans and livestock by proxy, leading to the rise of waterborne illnesses, like typhoid (Hugh, 2019: 11).

Further, Boko Haram and its affiliate, Islamic State in West Africa use control of the lake and its economic activity, like cross-border trade routes, to finance their activities (Bressler, 2020: 20). Before Boko Haram gained control, the fish and red pepper trade was a major source of exports for the Nigerian economy, generating approximately ₦19 billion per year and providing almost 300,000 people with employment (Oxfam, 2017: 3). But climate change has depleted fish stocks, creating a large reserve of unemployed fishers. The few who have continued to fish have faced new levies and taxes since Boko Haram took over (Salkida, 2020). HumAngle, a local news agency, reports that fishers have to pay around ₦15,000 every two weeks for fishing rights (Salkida, 2020). Those who are unable to pay face dire consequences: in 2014, Boko Haram killed 48 fishers by drowning them in the lake (BBC, 2014); in 2017, Boko Haram killed ‘at least 31 fishers’ (AFP, 2017); in 2020, Boko Haram killed ‘at least 50 fishers’ (BBC, 2020). In response to these brutal acts, the Nigerian state banned the production and trade of fish and red pepper (Mahmood & Ani, 2018). The Borno Fish Producers’ Association has reported a ₦500 million loss in business per year because of Boko Haram's changes to the production, collection of taxes and control over access to the lake (Okoye, 2021). Climate change and Boko Haram's violence are pushing people into extreme marginality, which is ground for recruiting new fighters (Nett & Rüttinger, 2016: 48; Salkida, 2020). Control over the lake allows the group to carry out its religio-political agenda while also creating an informal cash-based illicit and criminal economy network for financial power (Igwe, 2021; Salkida, 2020).

These volatile conditions allow Boko Haram to recruit more easily as the escalation in its violence corresponds to the increase in its membership (Vivekananda and Born, 2018; MacEachern, 2018; Watts, 2017; David et al., 2015). For insurgent movements, steady and continuous recruitment is a matter of survival as the membership size determines access to resources and human capital to carry out their goals (Maza et al., 2020: 2). Boko Haram's chief recruitment tactic includes financial incentives and manipulating anti-state sentiment using religious vernacular as a tool for radicalization. Through field research, David et al. (2015: 72) and Scott MacEachern (2018: 163) have found that the group's foot-soldiers primarily consist of people from the poorest communities. Aghedo and Osumah (2012: 861) note from their field research that the upsurge in Boko Haram's membership since 2009 ‘largely relates to the depth of feeling about socioeconomic injustice, marginalization, and human insecurity’. ¹ Indeed, many researchers have found that many individuals join Boko Haram primarily for monetary benefits. Suicide bombers are reportedly paid large sums of money to carry out attacks amounting to ₦10 million. For example, Mohammed Manga carried out a suicide-bombing attack on the Nigerian police headquarters in Ajuba, and he was paid ₦4 million, which he willed to his family (Onapajo & Uzodike, 2012: 27, 29). Boko Haram has also been reported to offer an income of approximately ₦3000 per month (Maza et al., 2020: 6). The UN Counter-Terrorism Committee found that it ‘pays between $30 and $312 per mission for women weapons carriers’ (UNCTED, 2019: 18). There is a clear correlation between recruitment and monetary gains. David et al. (2015: 90) write that it ‘offer[s] not just material well-being but also promises a greater after-life, indeed stands the chance of being very attractive to the destitute youths and children who are not sure where their next meal will come from, let alone any future life prospect’.

The increase in membership and the escalation in violence has led to the displacement of over 2.5 million people across the North (Watts, 2004: 2). Boko Haram's increasing presence in neighbouring countries, like Cameroon, has prevented people from seeking asylum out of Nigeria, causing millions of Internally Displaced Peoples to be trapped in towns controlled by Boko Haram where murder, sexual assault, hunger and destruction of the environment are fixtures of daily life (Osuoka & Haruna, 2019: 7). With mobility severely limited, there is an increased strain placed on already fragile natural resources, like freshwater. Caritas Canada found that ‘the admixture of a blighted ecology with the presence of Boko Haram insurgents’ has broken the region's social fabric, demolishing relations among families and between generations (Osuoka & Haruna, 2019: 7). Boko Haram exploits the conditions of precarity by offering financial incentives and alternative livelihood options, acting as the first responders to climate change in the absence of the state (Nett & Rüttinger, 2016: 3). This reveals important implications for ecological futures if militant far-right movements continue to amass power. Similar situations can unfold globally if/when a weakened state cannot handle extreme climate crises and emboldened far-right movements use that void to exploit the environment in their (counter)hegemonic struggle.

Two general patterns can be discerned. First, Boko Haram weaponizes scarce water in an attempt to fill the void left by the state, consequently establishing itself as the premier political authority and strengthening its informal illicit and criminal economy network (Skah & Lyammouri, 2020: 22). A vicious cycle emerges in which climate change exacerbates insecurity that militant Islamist movements exploit to their advantage, which creates further instability and destruction of the environment (Nett & Rüttinger, 2016: 17). Secondly, the deteriorating climate conditions have a detrimental impact on the agricultural sector, which in turn devastates traditional livelihoods, producing tremendous poverty that becomes fertile ground for recruitment (Nett & Rüttinger, 2016: 46). It is in this context that Lake Chad has now become the convergence point of a complex crisis of climate change and militant Islamist violence (Owonikoko & Momodu, 2020: 1308). In 2017, the UN Security Council declared it one of the world's worst humanitarian crises in the last decade, stating that ‘climate change was shaping the peace and security landscape’ in Lake Chad (Skah & Lyammouri, 2020: 19). What has the existing research said about the causes of these dual calamities? What solutions does it offer? The following section critically assesses the extant literature.

Critically interrogating the existing literature

Since the early 2000s, the academic and policy community has sought to understand the climate change–militant Islamist matrix. The general consensus is that climate change is ‘a threat multiplier’ that does not itself cause conflict but interacts with existing vulnerabilities to produce militant Islamist violence (Ahmed, 2011: 348). The differences in the literature stem from which existing threats authors privilege over others (European Union Institute for Security Studies, Raineri, 2020: 3). Some argue that ethno-religious cleavages and state dysfunction drive the climate change–militant Islamist nexus (Rapoport, 2004). Thomas Homer-Dixon offers a conservative perspective of ecological scarcity, population pressure and ‘grievances articulated by groups organized around clear social cleavages, such as ethnicity or religion’ that foster intrastate conflict over access to valuable resources (Homer-Dixon & Blitt, 1998). He argues that Boko Haram can be attributed to ‘a limited state presence and poor governance, underdevelopment and unemployment, environmental pressures enhanced by the receding waters of Lake Chad and desertification, and a deep history of Islamic conservatism’ (Homer-Dixon & Blitt, 1998: 18). Werz and Conley (2012: 16) add that climate change aggravates the existing dangerous combination of seasonal migration, rapid population growth, a weak state, and ethnic frictions between the Christian Yoruba and the Muslim Hausa-Fulani, fuelling ‘terrorism’. Rudincová (2017: 112) locates Boko Haram in the global ‘Islamic revivalist movement’ that is inspired by ‘deeply traditional Islamism based on the rejection of all Western and anti-Islamic influences’. Though she argues that religion itself is not a source of conflict, when climate change interacts with the revivalist movement, terrorism is a likely outcome, especially if the state is too weak to effectively manage sectarian and religious clashes (Rudincová, 2017). Price and Elu assert that West Africa is especially susceptible to ‘climate-induced Islamist terror’ because it has a long history of ‘Fulani and Hausa affinities for Islamic theocracy’ (2016: 1; 2017). Schleussner et al. (2016: 9216) add that ‘ethnicity appears to play a prominent and almost ubiquitous role’ in the conflict. Smith (2007: 270) argues that the issues in Nigeria are rooted in ‘sectarian clashes and religious differences’ that turn violent with the intensification of climate change. King and Burnell (2017: 67) state that ‘war is dramatically higher in countries with inter-ethnic social tensions. These divisions play a greater role than poverty, income inequality.’ Cumulatively, the authors argue in favour of strengthening the state through good governance mechanisms as a means of managing sectarian and ethno-religious contestations.

The second body of literature examines political and economic issues, like livelihood insecurity, unemployment and poverty, and corrupt governance. Kohler et al. (2019: 19) argue that the co-optation of scarce resources by militant Islamist groups ‘impact[s] the vulnerable in society where there are populations affected by climatic events, especially those living in drought-stressed regions’. They advocate strategies that aim to reduce the risks of conflict through international cooperation and governance mechanisms (Kohler et al., 2019). Eklöw and Krampe (2019) highlight state failure and corrupt political elites as elements that make up the climate change–militant Islamist matrix. Podesta and Ogden (2008: 118) emphasize factors such as wealth inequality and state failure, finding that the clash between these factors and climate change leads to an increase in militant Islamist violence. They argue that this poses grave national security and foreign policy challenges to the US. They advocate for greater intervention by the international community, particularly the US, who must play a central role as a first responder by investing in strategies like offshoring ‘sea basing’ platforms that do not require host countries’ consent (Podesta & Ogden, 2008: 133). De Coning and Krampe (2020: 18) add that climate change erodes the capacity of states to mitigate militant Islamism, so they emphasize greater Western intervention to empower and strengthen the national state, promote good governance and employ greater police-military intervention.

Despite the differences between the two literatures, the authors all offer a risk-oriented approach in which climate change acts as a ‘threat multiplier’ that leads to conflict when it interacts with other elements, like ethno-religious tensions and demographic pressures. Another similarity is that they place blame on the Nigerian state, which is portrayed as having a tendency towards corruption, authoritarianism and clientelism – making it unfit to handle crises of this nature (Rizzo, 2015). The solution proposed by authors at both ends of the spectrum is straightforward: Nigeria must strengthen its state by investing in enhancing good governance programmes, social welfare policies, development and law enforcement (Werz & Conley, 2012: 21). Others also advocate for greater intervention from the international community and global cooperation on climate change mitigation and sustainable growth policies (Podesta & Ogden, 2008; Nett & Rüttinger, 2016).

While this research appears to be logically sound, it is limited in its explanatory value. Two main problems emerge. First, narrow emphasis is placed on mechanistic connections deduced from abstract variables and rational choice thinking. The various factors are theorized as existing in a vacuum, unrelated to each other, and divorced from the broader global political economy – the Capitalocene. The authors present diverse independent variables, like weak governance, climate change and ethno-religious tensions, as wholly distinct recipe ingredients, which, when mixed together, inevitably lead to conflict. Such narratives erase the interdependence of these elements, disembedding them from the ‘broader set of historically bounded and politically contingent social relations that underpin them’ (Gonzales-Vicente, 2020: 104). This leads to ahistorical and apolitical explanations that overlook the systemic causes and interrelations of ecological crises and religion-based violence (Ahmed, 2011: 340). The second issue is that it offers technical, neoliberal policies that address the symptoms of the crisis rather than its root causes. These solutions comprise greater state intervention, securitization of climate change and increased militarization, all of which carry the potential of deepening the conditions of abjection that create violence in the first place.

These dominant perspectives miss how climate change and militant Islamist violence are manifestations of deeper systemic crises rooted in exploitative capitalist social relations. In contrast, a political economy approach sees Capitalocene as a totality, and examines its various parts (ex. weak governance) in relation to the whole system (ex. crisis of political economy brought about by the neoliberal stage of Capitalocene). Socio-ecological crises are produced in the context of historically specific political and socio-economic systems, and whether or not they lead to armed conflict depends on existing relations of power at local, national and transnational scales, and on how those relations are configured by structures of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism. Given that the above-mentioned literatures do not acknowledge and interrogate the systems at play, they conceal the underlying causes of the crisis and disembed climate change and militant Islamist violence from each other, thus rendering them politically nonactionable (Ribot et al., 2020: 61). Doing so sanitizes the impacts of the destructive tendencies of the Capitalocene in generating both climate change and militancy, thereby tacitly legitimizing an exploitative system as a natural and undisputable given that cannot be subject to debate or reform. Further, treating the various elements as independent variables leads to the reification of abstract notions of the primacy of the state (Ahmed, 2011: 349, 343).

The argument that weak governance leads to a tragedy of the commons where climate change-induced scarcity generates violent contestation over valuable resources does not recognize that the state exists in a complicated web of global capitalist relations that, in part, dictates how it can respond to climate crises. Such narratives, and their corresponding solutions of good governance, are, in effect, offering a moral critique of the state by pathologizing the Nigerian state as anti-democratic and authoritarian (Wengraf, 2018: 17). These racist undertones imply that the state is innately prone to corruption and mismanagement, unable to self-govern and requiring supervision from the international community, who must step in to save the citizens who are trapped in primordial violence (Wengraf, 2018: 17). This is a complete dismissal of the devastating impacts of Western colonial and imperial interventions that have eroded the state structure over time ² (Ahmed, 2011: 345). It also does not account for neoliberalism, which has hollowed out the state and undermined its capacity to protect citizens and environments against the harsh vicissitudes of capitalism (Beckman, 1991: 70). Nor do they take seriously the Global North's historic colonial accountability for climate change, which has caused severe ecological crises across the Global South (Gonzalez, 2015). It simply regurgitates the hackneyed and clichéd mantras that those suffering from poverty need economic development that their supposedly felonious governments are denying them. Moreover, by focusing on ‘terrorism’ discourses and obscuring the geopolitical context of the crisis, the above-mentioned literatures im/explicitly portray militant Islamist movements as irrationally evil apparitions that come into existence sporadically and unexplainably and turn into messianic demagogues who manipulate deteriorating conditions for their own benefit. This rhetoric draws on essentialist assumptions that do not make distinctions between Islam as a faith and militant Islamism as a political ideology emerging out of particular social relations. Militant Islamism is depicted as a static and unchanging ideology that has existed uninterrupted in Nigerian history. This casts Nigerian peoples as ‘variously villains, victims, or pawns’, in which the Muslim-majority North is discussed as though it is predisposed to violence (Ribot et al., 2020: 48). Such discourses divert attention away from class struggle towards flawed analyses of ethno-religious tensions. Although some studies adopt class-derived rhetoric (e.g. poverty), basic analyses of class struggle are missing, and class is treated as epiphenomenal to weak governance.

This leads to the securitization of the crisis, which is a ‘redundant conceptualization of global systemic crises [like climate change] purely as potential “threat-multipliers” of traditional security issues’ like militant Islamist violence (Ahmed, 2011: 351). The conjecture is that regions that carry geopolitical interest for capitalist states, that also happen to be Muslim majority and resource rich (e.g. Nigeria contains Africa's largest oil revenues), will also be sites of armed conflict that require militarizing measures, like the War on Terror (Ahmed, 2011: 351). This causes the problematization of entire religious and ethnic groups that are ‘Othered’ as belligerent and threatening, which consequently justifies violence against them to prevent any challenges to capital accumulation (Ahmed, 2011: 354). Rather than meaningfully addressing the contradictions of the Capitalocene that generate socio-ecological crises, culpability is displaced onto rebellious social groups. Instead of advocating for systemic solutions like anti-fracking policies in Nigeria and emissions reductions for Western countries, it adopts militaristic counter-terrorism solutions, which fuel vast profit-accumulating systems. Strengthening the repressive apparatuses of the state thus becomes a necessary solution to the crisis, but in reality serves to protect the transnational and national capitalist classes’ interests in the Nigerian oil industry (Wengraf, 2018: 17).

A cursory look into the War on Terror in Nigeria affirms this reality. Crises, like Lake Chad, are used to justify and expand the US military footprint in West Africa through the US African Command (AFRICOM) (Feldstein, 2018). From 2016 to 2020, the US Department of State provided USD$7.1 million for training, equipment and advisory support to the Nigerian military for its operations against Boko Haram (United States Department of State, 2022; Barraza, 2021). US Brigadier General Thomas Tickner has stated, ‘We recognize the growing significance our work in Africa has on achieving our national security goals. Having a permanent presence on the continent allows us to better leverage our capabilities to support AFRICOM's and the State Department's desired objectives’ (Barraza, 2021). US interests are couched in ‘security’ language, but in actuality it serves to protect Western exploitation of Nigerian oil – both the strategic interests in oil and the physical infrastructure of oil extraction. Further, militarized security responses have only worsened the situation in Nigeria as ‘there has long been anecdotal evidence that the Nigerian security agencies may have killed as many Nigerians as Boko Haram in certain time periods’ (Campbell, 2014: 13).

Exposing the taken-for-granted logics and problematic conceptions of security and militant Islamism that are so often unquestioningly repeated in ecological discourses is necessary because they have material implications on the way those committed to ecological justice mobilize politically, economically, socially and ecologically, and they have consequences for how ecological imperialism and neoliberal extractivism adapt to preserve their interests (Baldwin and Erickson, 2020: 5). In the following section, I offer a materialist examination of the climate change–militant Islamist matrix in Lake Chad.

A climate change–militant Islamism nexus assemblage

The existing research is unable to explain the Lake Chad disaster as a historical totality. To grasp the root causes of the conflict, it is necessary to situate the dynamics of Lake Chad within the historical and contemporary socio-ecological and political-economic power structures that influence its rise and transformation. Instead of presenting temporal narratives of progression towards development or regression into barbarity, which feature prominently within neoliberal discourses, we need to view the various elements of the whole as ‘forever shifting, crumpling, and multiplying, disappearing and reappearing’ (Puar, 2005: 130).

This is important in explaining why in this particular moment, the Boko Haram crisis has unfolded the way it has and why similar situations either do or do not materialize elsewhere. By linking the economic to the political to the social to the ecological, we can understand the Lake Chad crisis as stemming from the contradictions of Capitalocene, where militant Islamist violence is not simply a side effect of worsening ecoclimatic events, but rather is a symptom of the wider social dislocation caused by capitalist subjugation. This phenomenon is mirrored in far-right populist literature that locates the rise of the far right in the West as a response to the devastating socio-economic impacts of neoliberalism, which suggests continuity in the crisis and effects of the Capitalocene globally. These transnational links further affirm that the Boko Haram case does not need to be analysed as separate from the far-right literature. This directly attacks the orientalist and Islamophobic roots of terrorism literature that casts Boko Haram as distinct because of its religious foundations.

The socio-ecological crisis unfolding in Nigeria is intimately connected to capital's exploitation of its two most valuable sources: humans and the earth. Where the depletion of Lake Chad is an ecological consequence of infinite economic growth on a finite planet, the militant Islamism of Boko Haram is a social consequence of class struggle and of the exploitation of humans in a capitalist system. Both crises emerge from and are embedded in the Capitalocene, so they cannot be discussed as separate from one another or divorced from the capitalist political economy, which ‘[annihilates] the human and natural substance of society’ (Polanyi, 1944: 3). The next part will trace some important elements of the whole that converge to give birth to the conflict.

Capitalocene

‘Humans transformed environments from the very beginning,’ but capitalism radically altered these dynamics by ushering in a new era of social relations in which nature was deployed for large-scale commodity production and exchange and profit maximization (Moore, 2017: 610). Termed the ‘Capitalocene’, it is composed of ecological regimes dictated by the laws of motion of ever-expanding capital accumulation (Foster et al., 2010: 71).

Capitalocene is a way of organizing relations between nature, humans and work for accumulation that relies on ‘cheapened’ nature, which renders food, labour, energy and raw materials accessible for appropriation. This necessitates waves of global expansion through imperialism, which has demanded the construction of global webs of racialized and gendered domination (Moore, 2017: 607, 609). The West's development has been dependent on the underdevelopment of the Global South through unequal ecological exchange facilitated by violent colonialism (Adelman, 2019: 38). Today, the transnational capitalist class has a carbon footprint that is estimated to be 175 times more than the world's poorest 10 per cent (Malm, 2016: 248). Science has confirmed that since 1989, just 100 multinational corporations headquartered in the West, like fossil fuel producer Shell, are responsible for 71 per cent of industrial greenhouse gas emissions (Griffin, 2017: 10). These emissions are directly linked to the intensification of desertification and droughts in the Global South, which are causing water scarcity in drylands like the Sahel (Griffin, 2017: 10). The ecological impacts of colonialism, fossil fuel use, and exploitation of cheap natures are outsourced to the Global South, while their benefits are reaped by the Global North (Diffenbaug & Burke, 2019: 9808). So, despite being responsible for a significantly smaller share of greenhouse gas emissions, the Global South faces more extreme impacts of climate hazards, while possessing far fewer material adaptation resources.

As Gonzalez (2015: 422) outlines, the North–South ecological divide occurs along four injustices. First, it is distributive injustice because the Capitalocene emerged in the Global North, but it has produced the harshest impact in the Global South. Secondly, it is procedural injustice because the Global North dominates multilateral governance organizations, giving them an upper hand during environmental treaty negotiations that allows them to protect their interests and ignore the needs of the Global South. Thirdly, it is corrective injustice because the Global North owes the Global South a significant ecological debt, which it refuses to acknowledge. Lastly, it is social injustice as the Capitalocene continues to facilitate ecological imperialism (Gonzalez, 2015: 422).

Colonialism

The Capitalocene enveloped Nigeria during Britain's colonization in the nineteenth century. The imperial expansion focused on expropriating raw materials and importing British goods to the newly constructed Nigerian market. The region was fragmented into three zones, Southern, Northern and Western, with each region specializing in an agricultural export commodity (Uwazurike & Mbabuike, 2004: 203). These regions also comprised distinct ethno-religious groups: Hausa-Fulani Muslims in the North, the Yoruba in the West and the Ibo Christians in the South (Watts, 2017: 60).

British rule aimed at consolidating differences of class, ethnicity, religion and region to prevent unification (Uwazurike & Mbabuike, 2004: 203). This was coupled with the combined and uneven development of capitalism across Nigeria (Wengraf, 2018: 24). Lagos, in the South, was established as the crown colony, and efforts were made to construct a railroad network and other infrastructure to facilitate trade. The North did not receive the same kind of investment, so it was plagued by low levels of development; these ‘colonial differences produced postcolonial disparities’, leading to a stark schism between the regions today (Thurston, 2017: 25).

At independence in 1960, Nigeria inherited a political and economic machine that was predicated on a regime of violence in which an alliance of the domestic bourgeois class and foreign capital ensured that the country continued to operate as a ‘citadel of neocolonial domination’ (Beckman, 1982: 39). Post-colonial Nigeria became an export-enclave economy dependent on the exportation of goods from the agricultural sector (Beckman, 1982). Given its relatively strong position, the South gained dominance, while the North has lagged behind and struggled to use political power to generate economic development, leading to higher rates of unemployment, illiteracy and poverty (David et al., 2015: 10). This period was marked by developmentalist state approaches that sought to protect labour and natural resources to a degree (David et al., 2015). However, the advent of neoliberalism in the 1970s signalled a new global regime of ecological imperialism, ending the developmental state approach, and entrenching the Washington Consensus (Moore, 2018: 10).

Neoliberalism

Since the 1940s, oil has become a structural requirement for capital accumulation. Post-independence, Nigeria's southern Delta, which contains the world's tenth-largest oil reserves, became a geopolitical hotspot for petroleum extraction (Gonzalez, 2015: 411). In the 1970s, a heavily indebted Nigeria transformed from an agriculture-dominated economy towards a petroleum economy, in which multinational conglomerates, like Shell, worked with the state to employ exploitative practices to keep costs low (Watts, 2004: 59). This exacerbated uneven development because the South was established as a centre of accumulation, so its economic and political development was prioritized to create a favourable environment for foreign investment, while the agriculture-dominated North was left behind (Wengraf, 2018: 27).

These processes were facilitated by neoliberalism, which subordinated labour and environments to finance imperialism through the complex debt schemes of the structural adjustment programmes enforced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Wengraf, 2018: 27). In 1986, General Babangida implemented a series of stringent economic and political reforms in exchange for debt repayment assistance from the IMF, which included trade liberalization, elimination of labour and environmental regulations, privatization of public goods and state-owned industries, austerity, gutting public sector wages and jobs, and the intensification of export production to service foreign debt (Watts, 2004: 61). The state retreated from social welfare provisioning and invested in carceral apparatuses to protect the continual flow of oil from rising social unrest (Wengraf, 2018: 35). These structural changes have largely only benefited foreign capital and the domestic bourgeois class. They have adversely affected democratic rule, created crises of legitimacy for successive governments, caused irreparable harm to the environment, reduced the state's institutional capacity, intensified socio-economic inequalities and generated a ‘survivalist culture and a politics of ethnic mobilization’ (Udoh, 2020: 202; Watts, 2004: 61).

Today, oil accounts for over 80 per cent of Nigeria's GDP (World Bank, 2018). Shell produces 43 per cent of Nigerian oil through gas flaring; ³ in 2002, the World Bank noted that ‘flaring in Nigeria had contributed more greenhouse gases to the Earth's atmosphere than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa combined’ (Stockman et al., 2009: 11). Despite facing substantial legal scrutiny over human rights abuses, pollution and oil spills, Shell refuses to change its practices, and the state refuses to hold it accountable (Amnesty International, 2020). A great rift has emerged in which the state gains unprecedentedly high revenues from oil sales, which are partially reinvested in southern infrastructure, while rates of unemployment, precarity and poverty increase at alarmingly high speeds, especially in the North, where ‘Muslim populations stood in a more attenuated relation to oil wealth’ (Gonzalez, 2015: 411; Watts, 2017: 32). The poverty rate in the North is approximately 75 per cent, in stark contrast to the South, where the poverty rate is estimated to be 27 per cent (Faluyi et al., 2019: 2). In 2008, former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Chukwuma Soludo, observed that astronomical levels of poverty in the country had become a ‘northern phenomenon’ (David et al., 2015: 87). This precarity, alienation and exclusion are produced and reproduced, pushing disenfranchised people towards the margins to the most dangerous zones of climate change, forcing them to rely on shrinking resource bases without any alternatives (Malm & Esmailian, 2013: 487).

Crisis of social reproduction

The neoliberal state has been plagued with the declining capacity to deliver public goods, including basic survival needs like healthcare, affordable housing, food security, clean water and more, especially in regions suffering from water scarcity, like Lake Chad (Maza et al., 2020: 99). As a result, 44 per cent of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition, which is roughly 14.5 million children who are at risk of dying or not developing into healthy adults (World Bank, 2018: 53). Underrepresented and neglected by the national government, citizens feel estranged from political processes because they are unable to influence the political economy that shapes their lives (Ribot et al., 2020: 60). The breakdown of the social safety net has prevented people from relying on the state or their traditional social networks. Neoliberal policies displace the cost, risk and burdens of economic insecurity from the state onto the individual, who must now search for alternative sources of protection. This leads to hyper-individualism in which each individual is responsible and accountable for their own well-being, and success and failures are perceived as personal failings, rather than structural oppression (Cooper, 2017: 13).

With the elimination of the protective cover of democratic safeguards and faced with indefinite social dislocations, people turn to other forms of associations to construct social solidarities and express a collective will (Cooper, 2017: 89). In the North, this crisis of social reproduction is politicized in distinct ethnic and religious ways. Northern Nigerians ‘facing a lifetime of indefinite precarity are doing what they can to transform their situations. They are motivated often to their deaths, not by here-and-now hardships, but by deeply human concerns for their own and their families’ future’ (Ribot et al., 2020: 48). As the Capitalocene disrupts livelihoods, erodes social cohesion and displaces entire social groups from their ancestral lands, the resulting disenfranchisement, marginalization and social disconnection turn people towards Boko Haram.

Conclusion

The climate change–militant Islamist nexus emerges in these tensions, struggles and contradictions. Boko Haram is speaking to the ongoing crisis of planetary life and how societies react and adapt to climate change, especially in reactionary ways. Lake Chad has emerged as a site of violent contestation as a result of the assemblages of Capitalocene. The rise in insurgency cannot be reduced to essentialist narratives of ideology or ‘global Islamic revivalist movements’. In this instance, it is clear that Islamic militancy of poor young Nigerian men is an expression of violent political protests that are comparable to other forms of regressive opposition to the Capitalocene, like violent far-right movements in Europe. By ignoring these histories and systems, and displacing blame onto other factors, as the mainstream literature has done exceptionally well, it provides the Global North and its adjacent non-governmental organizations and international financial institutions with narratives that depoliticize the conflict and downplay their responsibilities while at the same time creating an avenue for further imperialist intervention through the War on Terror.

This chapter is a modest effort to ground the links between climate change and escalation of militant Islamist violence in a concrete case study and provide the momentum for more detailed discussions on various climate change–militant Islamist relations from critical perspectives. In doing so, I aim to contribute to the political ecologies of the far-right literature and to the broader body of scholarship on the social responses to the Capitalocene. Moving forward, there is a pressing need to examine how gender relations, connections to transnational militant Islamist movements like ISIS, and cross-border recruitment influence the climate change–militant Islamist nexus.