Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement

Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement, Alexander Thurston's 2018 scholarly history from Princeton University Press, Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics, is the first full academic history of Boko Haram, drawing on Arabic and Hausa sources, propaganda material and interviews, from its early 2000s origins under Mohammed Yusuf through the Chibok kidnapping and the 2015 split into Islamic State West Africa Province. Its strength is that it draws on primary language sources few other studies of the movement use. Its limit is that specific Kano or Zamfara sharia criminal cases sit at the edge of, not the centre of, this book's own study; a claim about one such case needs its own dedicated source.