Religious Conflict and Boko Haram's Insurgency in Nigeria

Nigeria has experienced recurring intercommunal violence with strong religious dimensions, particularly in the Middle Belt states where Muslim herder and Christian farmer communities have clashed over land and resources in conflicts that have killed thousands over the past two decades, and more severely through Boko Haram, a jihadist insurgency founded around 2002 that seeks to establish strict Islamic rule and rejects Western education, whose escalating violence since 2009, including mass killings, suicide bombings and the internationally publicized 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions across northeastern Nigeria and the wider Lake Chad basin. An Islamic State-affiliated faction that split from Boko Haram has continued a parallel insurgency, and northern Nigerian states including Kano and Zamfara have implemented sharia-based criminal law codes for Muslims since the early 2000s, applying alongside the country's secular federal constitution in a dual legal system that has produced internationally covered cases involving capital punishment for offenses such as adultery and blasphemy, most reduced or overturned on appeal, and continuing tension between religious minorities and sharia enforcement in those states.