Fifteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper explores political vulnerability under postcolonial conditions through examining the preventing/countering violent extremism (P/CVE) project in Nigeria. Notions of care and vulnerability have become increasingly central to various policy prescriptions which have increased security practice into society and permeated everyday life. To date, studies which have addressed P/VCE within the postcolonial context mostly treated the concept which underpins these projects – radicalisation – as unproblematic which has allowed for studies into effectiveness with usual ‘problem-solving’ propensities. Engaging with the various security policies and practices which the Nigerian government has adopted against Jama’atu Ahlis-Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad, or JAS – popularly known as Boko Haram) and Islamic State West Africa (ISWA), the study argues that preventing/countering violent extremism in postcolonial colonial conditions such as in Nigeria presents serious ontological security problems not only with constructing a consistent self through a viable biographical narrative – which I call a precarious mythologization – but also the troubling history of Africa(ns) within global trust relations and how the Kierkegaardian dread at the heart of such constructions reveals the inherent contradictions in the ‘dread-dreaded’ conundrum posited through the double Latin concepts of terra incognita and terra nullius.