Boko Haram

Brandon Kendhammer is associate professor of political science and director of international development studies at Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio. He has published widely on religion, ethnicity, and politics in Nigeria, and is the author of Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria.Carmen McCain is assistant professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. Her research focuses on Hausa-language literature, film, and popular culture. In addition to her academic articles on Nigerian film and literature, she has been a columnist with the Nigerian newspaper Daily Trust and has taught at several Nigerian universities.

[This] nimble short history … stands out for a section on creative responses to the group in literature and television. It also explores how the conflict's intractability has given rise to a thick culture of conspiracy theories, propelled by social media…. Kendhammer and McCain trace the conspiratorial mindset to a history of Nigerian government corruption. Nigeria, they show, deals with the same vexations of fake news as the rest of the globalized world, but via its own particular history. (The Times Literary Supplement)