Abstract:
How did two non-state actors from significantly different regions develop into insurgent
organizations in Nigeria after its return to democratic rule on 29 May 1999? Although the northeast
and Niger Delta regions are poles apart in historical, material, and socio-cultural structures, they
bore the rise of Boko Haram and the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force. The emergence of
violent non-state actors in both areas at about the same time, despite their substantial differences,
is puzzling and offers an appropriate opportunity to probe the process and mechanism of
insurrectionary group emergence in Nigeria since the new democratic dispensation. Studies have
emphasized certain grievances, resources, and religious ideology as causal factors in the rise of
guerrilla groups. Despite the contributions of these theories they fail to capture the relatively nonrebellious
inception of these groups. They also gloss over the initial cooperation these organizations
had with local political elites. Other challenges with the existing approaches include the often
country-wide narrative which disallows a within-state comparison and the failure to account for
timing and location. To address these gaps, this thesis builds on the patron-client model and the
Political Process theory to develop the Political Relevance model. This new model focuses on the
way political interactions that took place between local politicians and the would-be insurgent
groups facilitated the evolution of the social organizations from non-violence to violence. It
espouses a four-step process that argues that rebel organizations emerge from a fissure in an initial
mutually beneficial relationship between local political elites and a politically relevant group.