Books

Book review. The Chibok Girls

Chibok is perhaps the poorest and most neglected of all the twenty-seven local government areas in Borno State, in north-eastern Nigeria. It was recorded as an area of 1,350 km² with a population of 66,105 at the 2006 census. Most of the people are farmers and hunters, although many younger men and women occupied mid-level…

In November 2015 a report released by the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and peace (Iep) stated a somehow unexpected truth. In 2014 it was Boko Haram, and not the dreaded Islamic State or Al Qaeda, the deadliest terrorist group in the world. The Nigerian insurgents were responsible for 6,664 deaths, six hundred more than those…

Starting a conflict, history shows, might be quite easy; ending it is undoubtedly harder. The most difficult, and in some cases even daunting, challenge for leaders and policy-makers, however is how to reconcile a country, or a community, which has experienced such a deep rift. This is something that the citizens of many African states…

From the moment when the 11/9 attacks inevitably changed the way in which a number of issues were communicated to and perceived by the general public, Islam has been at the heart of many discussions at every level. It’s extremely striking, though, that fifteen years after those tragic events, despite all the changes that the…

The role played by media – both traditional and social – in the 2011 Arab uprisings cannot be underestimated, and this is particularly true in the case of Egypt. In the years that preceded the successful anti Mubarak uprising from 25th January to 11th February, Facebook and Twitter were used by activists as a platform…

One of the consequences of the spreading of social network usage is the possibility of metaphorically having the entire world at hand. By simply logging in on Facebook, Twitter or similar platforms and typing the appropriate words or names in a searchbox, one can be informed in real time of what is happening in that…

Few State are, at the same time, so relevant for the news media (or at least for some of it) and so difficult to cover as Eritrea. Despite having been for years one of the countries from which a great number of refugees try to reach the shores of Europe, no truly new and reliable…

According to a decades-old (but false) saying “aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but it doesn’t know it, so it goes flying”. It’s a line that comes to the mind many times while reading “Nigeria. A new history of a turbulent century”, by Richard Bourne, a senior research fellow at the UK’s Institute…

Apart from being pointed at as the most credible menace for stability in the Middle East and the West, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (Is) is also a case study for experts in history and political science. How one among the many militias active in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq could turn into a regional actor capable of…

Whether the so called Islamic State will be an important part of history books in the future, nobody can actually tell. Nevertheless, the rapid and apparently sudden rise of the extremist group led by the self-anointed caliph Abubakr al-Baghdadi has pushed many researchers and journalists all around the world to focus on this bloody and…

The exploitation of natural resources, from diamond to oil, is among the most debated issues when dealing with Africa. Scores of news stories, op-eds, documentaries, research papers and even works of fiction have been dedicated to this subject, to the extent that sometimes whoever approaches the matter for the first time finds himself at a…

When in late October last year a wave of protest in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou forced the then president Blaise Compaoré to flee after 27 years in power, many political commentators began to wonder which country would be next. Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly, who at the time were working on a book on urban…

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