UNIVERSITY OF GHANA COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES NEW DIMENSIONS OF TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM TITILOPE FOLARIN AJAYI (10120371) This thesis is submitted to the University of Ghana in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the award of PHD in INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS Degree. LEGON MARCH 2021 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh i 1 November 2022 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ii DEDICATION For Oreoluwa and Shika For Leah Sharibu For the ‘Chibok Girls’ For the Aboke Girls For stolen girlhoods and all girls and women everywhere affected by conflict May you know Equality. Respect. Safety. Inclusion. Empowerment. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people made this journey possible. From start, to middle, to finish. Directly and indirectly, materially and symbolically. My victory is yours too. I am indebted to you all. Professor and Mrs. Olupomi Ajayi Modupe, Olufunke and Mokunfope Ajayi Bring Back Our Girls Movement Social Science Research Council Next Generation Fellowship Programme International Society for Third-Sector Research Professor Akosua Adomako Ampofo Professor Thomas Tieku Professor Ebenezer Obadare Professor Kwaku Danso- Boafo Professor Yaw Benneh Professor Henrietta Mensah-Bonsu Professor Dzodzi Tsikata Professor Charles Ukeje Professor Ismail Rashid Professor Cyril Obi Professor Sarah Ssali Professor Rita Abrahamsen Professor Francis Nyamnjoh Professor Lai Erinosho Professor Amina Mama Professor Fredline McCormack-Hale Dr. Oludare Ogunlana Dr. Amanda Coffie Dr. Phillip Attuquayefio Dr. Juliana Appiah-Ahorsu Dr. Gideon Onuoha Dr. Steve Akoth Dr. Adam Branch Dr. Zibah Nwako Dr. Edwin Adjei Dr. Dzifa Tovikey Dr. Kajsa Adu Hallberg Dr. Christopher Pallas Dr. Mjiba Frehiwot Dr. Hlengiwe Ndlovu Dr. Kerubo Abuya Dr. Cecelia Idika-Kalu Nnamdi Obasi Awo Aidam Amenyah Dr. Nicodemus Minde Dr. Margaret Monyani Oluwafisayo Ajala Oluwaseun Layade Adenike Ademuyiwa University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh v ABSTRACT The historic phenomenon of transnational activism, defined as political mobilisation across borders, has long been characterised by the agentic primacy of Global North political actors and professional advocacy by formal civil society organisations and networks. Bring Back Our Girls, the movement by Nigerian women for the rescue of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in 2014, is one of several new activisms that breaks this mould, marking a shift toward spontaneous, mass-based protests initiated and led by eclectic Global South actors and grounded in Global South contexts. Some recent scholarship recognises the North-South shift of transnational activist agency, yet much of it remains focused on NGO advocacy and social movements that originate in the Global North. This means that vital insights are missing from knowledge of how transnational resistance is happening today and what this means for international politics. It also signals an imperative to revisit dominant models and theories of transnational activism in order to update them. Using interviews with 27 Bring Back Our Girls leaders and participants, digital ethnography and content analysis, this study asks: what does Bring Back Our Girls reveal about the changing structure, motives and function of contemporary transnational activism? The case of Bring Back Our Girls affords empirical insights from an African-led activism for the rights of girls in an epistemic field centred on Global North activists and malestream actors. I argue that Bring Back Our Girls signals a new direction of transnational activism which I theorise as multimodal transconnective activism. This framework rests on three pillars: a mix of formal and informal actors in which constellations of informal social networks are prominent; individuals' motives for activist engagement as important but understudied drivers of transnational activism that stem from their personal and social identities, values, beliefs and University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh vi positionalities; and a shift in the relationship between Global South and North activists from dependence to collaboration, signalling a reconfiguration of core-periphery dynamics in terms of who ‘owns’ political problems and who leads their resolution. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh vii ACRONYMS AWDF African Women’s Development Fund BBOG Bring Back Our Girls CSO Civil Society Organisation FEMNET African Women's Development and Communication Network INGO International Non-governmental Organisation IR International Relations NGO Non-governmental Organisation NOLA Network of Labour Activism RP Research Participant TAN Transnational Advocacy Network UK United Kingdom US United States University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh viii Table of Contents DECLARATION ............................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. DEDICATION ................................................................................................................................ i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... v ACRONYMS ................................................................................................................................ vii LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................ xi LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... xi CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................................................ 1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 1.0 Introduction and Problem Statement .................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Research Question ................................................................................................................................. 4 1.2 Objectives ............................................................................................................................................... 5 1.3 Justification and contributions to knowledge ..................................................................................... 6 1.4 Overview of conceptual framework ..................................................................................................... 8 1.4.1 Interpretivism ...................................................................................................................................... 8 1.4.2 Decoloniality ...................................................................................................................................... 9 1.5 Operationalisation of Key Concepts .................................................................................................. 11 1.5.1 Activism ........................................................................................................................................... 11 1.5.2 Transnationalism and transnationality .............................................................................................. 12 1.6 Overview of Research Design and Methodology .............................................................................. 15 1.7 Chapterisation ..................................................................................................................................... 16 CHAPTER TWO .......................................................................................................................... 18 A CONTEXTUAL OVERVIEW OF BRING BACK OUR GIRLS ............................................. 18 2.0 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 18 2.1 A Historical Overview of Transnational Activism ........................................................................... 18 2.2 Outlining the Context of Bring Back Our Girls ............................................................................... 27 2.2.1 Rising global activism and a ‘backlash against democracy’ ............................................................. 27 2.2.2 The Boko Haram conflict, militarism and the global war on terror .................................................. 28 2.2.3 Women’s organising, feminism and the girling of development ...................................................... 34 2.2.4 Digital activism in the Internet age ................................................................................................... 37 2.3 A Timeline of Bring Back Our Girls ................................................................................................. 39 2.4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 46 CHAPTER THREE ..................................................................................................................... 47 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY ......................................................................... 47 3.0 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 47 3.1 Research Paradigms ........................................................................................................................... 47 3.2 Research Design .................................................................................................................................. 48 3.3 Population of Interest ......................................................................................................................... 49 3.4 Study Participants ............................................................................................................................... 50 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ix 3.1.1 Participant selection .......................................................................................................................... 52 3.2 Data Collection .................................................................................................................................... 54 3.2.2 Review of existing literature ............................................................................................................. 54 3.2.3 Key informant interviews ................................................................................................................. 54 3.5.2 Community access ............................................................................................................................ 57 3.6 Digital Media Research ...................................................................................................................... 58 3.6.1 Digital Ethnography .......................................................................................................................... 59 3.6.2 Digital archival research and Content analysis ................................................................................. 60 3.7 Ethical Considerations ........................................................................................................................ 60 3.7.1 Confidentiality .................................................................................................................................. 61 3.7.2 Trustworthiness ................................................................................................................................ 61 3.8 Data Analysis ....................................................................................................................................... 62 3.9 Methodological Challenges and Constraints .................................................................................... 63 3.9.1 Availability of participants ............................................................................................................... 63 3.9.2 Participants’ difficulty recalling past events ..................................................................................... 64 3.9.3 Internet connectivity ......................................................................................................................... 64 3.9.4 Digital data decay ............................................................................................................................. 65 3.9.5 Digital access to data ........................................................................................................................ 65 3.9.6 Global Coronavirus health crisis ....................................................................................................... 65 CHAPTER FOUR ........................................................................................................................ 67 4.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 67 4.2 Conceptualising Transnational Activism .......................................................................................... 69 4.3 A Taxonomy of Transnational Activism Actors ............................................................................... 74 4.4 Relations among Transnational Activism Actors ............................................................................. 82 4.4.1 The Boomerang Model and its variants ............................................................................................ 83 4.5 Motivations for Participation in Transnational Activism by NGO Actors .................................... 93 4.5.1 Ideological-Normative motivations .................................................................................................. 93 4.5.2 Rational, strategic or instrumental motivations ................................................................................ 99 4.6 Informality in IR ............................................................................................................................... 104 4.7 The Ethics of Decoloniality and Theory from the South ............................................................... 106 4.8 Conclusion: Continuities and Discontinuities in Transnational Activism .................................... 107 CHAPTER FIVE ....................................................................................................................... 110 (RE)SITUATING NON-NGO AGENCY IN TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM ........................ 110 5.0 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 110 5.1 The Changing Context of Transnational Activism ......................................................................... 111 5.2 Transnational Activism: ‘New’ Directions or New Forms? .......................................................... 114 5.2.1 Reconstructing transnational advocacy networks ........................................................................... 120 5.3 Motivations for Participation in Transnational Activism by Individual Actors .......................... 125 5.3.1 Demographic factors ....................................................................................................................... 126 5.3.2 Social factors .................................................................................................................................. 129 5.3.3 Psychological factors ...................................................................................................................... 131 5.4 Digital activism and new theories of engagement ........................................................................... 133 5.5 Modelling New Forms of Transnational Activism ......................................................................... 134 5.6 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 136 CHAPTER SIX .......................................................................................................................... 138 ‘NEW’ STRUCTURES AND FORMS OF TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM ........................... 138 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh x 6.0 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 138 6.1 Bring Back Our Girls Nigeria .......................................................................................................... 139 6.2 Bring Back Our Girls in Ghana ....................................................................................................... 143 6.2.1 ‘Bring Back Our Girls-Ghana’ ....................................................................................................... 143 6.2.2 Bring Back Our Girls Ghana – Candlelight Vigil ........................................................................... 144 6.2.3 Bring Back Our Girls Protests by School Children ........................................................................ 145 6.2.4 Nigerians in Ghana ......................................................................................................................... 145 6.2.5 Other Bring Back Our Girls Episodes ............................................................................................ 146 6.3 Bring Back Our Girls in Kenya ....................................................................................................... 146 6.3.1 Transnational Linkages ................................................................................................................... 149 6.4 Bring Back Our Girls in the US ....................................................................................................... 150 6.4.1 Bring Back Our Girls in New York ................................................................................................ 150 6.5 Pathways to Participation .................................................................................................................. 158 6.6 Transnational Power Relations ......................................................................................................... 159 6.6.1 Situating agency within transnational Bring Back Our Girls .......................................................... 161 6.7 Conclusion: Toward a New Typology of Transnational Activism ................................................. 162 CHAPTER SEVEN .................................................................................................................... 165 MOTIVES OF PARTICIPATION IN TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM .................................. 165 7.0 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 165 7.1 Social and Self-Identities .................................................................................................................. 165 7.1.1 Womanhood .................................................................................................................................... 166 7.1.2 Maternality ..................................................................................................................................... 169 7.1.3 Nationality, diasporicity and other tropes of belonging .................................................................. 171 7.1.4 Humanitarianism and global citizenship ......................................................................................... 174 7.1.5 Race ................................................................................................................................................ 178 7.1.6 Profession ....................................................................................................................................... 179 7.1.7 Faith ................................................................................................................................................ 182 7.1.8 Emotions ......................................................................................................................................... 183 7.1.9 Embodied resistance ....................................................................................................................... 184 7.1.10 Norms ......................................................................................................................................... 185 CHAPTER EIGHT .................................................................................................................... 187 CONCLUSION, ANALYSIS, POLICY IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ...... 187 8.0 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 187 8.1 Key Findings and Contributions to Knowledge and Theory ......................................................... 188 8.1.1 ‘New’ Dimensions of Transnational Activism ............................................................................... 188 8.1.2 Theorising from the South and Decolonising International Relations ............................................ 191 8.2 Policy Implications and Recommendations .................................................................................... 192 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 194 ANNEXES .................................................................................................................................. 214 A. Consent Form .................................................................................................................................... 214 B. Interview Schedule ............................................................................................................................ 217 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh xi LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Anonymised list of research participants .........................................................................50 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Anti-colonial solidarity model ........................................................................................24 Figure 2: Taxonomy of transnational activism .................................................................................... 82 Figure 3: The Boomerang Model of Transnational Activism ........................................................... 84 Figure 4: The Insider Policy Lobby Model of Transnational Activism ........................................... 86 Figure 5: The Inverse Boomerang ........................................................................................................ 88 Figure 6: Attributes of NGO-led and direct transnational activism ................................................ 117 Figure 7: Elements of connective and collective action networks .................................................. 123 Figure 8: Integrative model of new transnational activism .............................................................. 135 Figure 9: Taxonomy of transnational activism .................................................................................. 164 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 1 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.0 Introduction and Problem Statement On 14 April 2014, the armed group known as Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from their government school in Chibok, a town in Borno State, northeast Nigeria. The group had been responsible for extreme acts of violence since the conflict began in 2009, but the abduction catalysed the emergence of Bring Back Our Girls—a campaign for the return of the students which was started and led primarily by Nigerian women in various cities in Nigeria. Their activism began as loosely organised protests across Nigeria and with a hashtag, #BringBackOurGirls. It then spread quickly around the world as thousands of people from at least 50 geographically dispersed countries led related online and offline campaigns. According to Ibeh (2014b), ‘at its peak, the #BringBackOurGirls movement spread to 69 countries with its strongest external online support coming from the United States, Britain and Canada’. Bring Back Our Girls involved representatives of Nigerian civil society organisations and used familiar repertoires of organised resistance, such as protest marches, songs and petitions, to engage national and international governance institutions. Yet, in many ways, the group symbolises new patterns in the structure, form and function of transnational activism, defined as political mobilisation across national borders. Cammaerts (2015:7) prepares the ground for theorising these new directions by observing that today’s transnational advocacy networks ‘are becoming virtual, more fluid, more decentralised, more de-institutionalised and more global’. Bring Back Our Girls, like the North African uprisings and other contemporary movements, fits University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 2 this description: it was active online, spread quickly across state borders, did not have a central coordinating or operational structure and involved actors in many different parts of the world who participated for different reasons. However, close examination of the campaign offers deeper insights into changing structures of transnational resistance, motivations for engagement in activism and relations between Global South1 and international actors. Firstly, where considerable scholarship focuses on the activities of professional transnational advocacy networks and social movement organisations, Bring Back Our Girls reveals the growing role and importance in transnational relations of individual actors and informal networks, as opposed to states and formal organisations. The individuals who have led Bring Back Our Girls in different spaces have been predominantly Global South actors with international agency, leverage and presence, who thus had the ability to represent their interests in international contexts. Secondly, while collective identities influenced some people’s decision to join Bring Back Our Girls, individual identities, personal values and interpersonal social relations were important motivating factors that underline the increasing significance of individuality and informality in transnational activism. Thirdly, Bring Back Our Girls’ origin in Nigeria and the centrality of Global South actors in its transnational activities illustrate the decline of white saviourism, a corresponding rise in the transnational agencies of Global South actors and a shift from relations of dependence with Northern actors toward collaboration. All these factors reflect new directions of transnational activism, which are theorised in this study as multimodal transconnective action. This new theoretical framework addresses the tendency in scholarship to segment different strands of transnational activism by building on the idea that Bring Back Our Girls is a form of transnational collective action that encompasses a diverse mix of actors and networks, motives and University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 3 modalities of participation and engagement. These new directions in transnational activism do not find resonance in the existing literature for two main reasons: first, a persistent focus on cases in countries of the Global North and second, ‘malestream’2 international relations meta-theories are more interested in collectivist formal organising and give little attention to women’s movements. Transnational activism is a historic phenomenon that dates to the uprisings of enslaved Africans in the 18th and 19th centuries (Santiago-Valles 2005; David 2007; Adi 2018). Since that time, it has been performed by individual and collective actors across the world using varied repertoires to achieve a range of objectives with different outcomes. Since the 2010 North African Spring, whose conceptualisation as the 'Arab Spring' obfuscates the African agency involved (Branch and Mampilly 2015:2-3)3, activism across the world has surged (Branch and Mampilly 2015:2, 13), as has mass-based transnational activism by loosely connected individuals (Castells 2015).4 Contemporary hyperglobalised contexts have produced new forms of resistance, in Africa and the rest of the world, that differ, as previously stated, from older traditional social movements in location, mobility, function and operation, and structure and scale (Cammaerts 2015:7). This growing pattern is at odds with theses about transnational advocacy that foreground the role and agency of Global North actors as advocates for Global South activisms, and the collectivist approaches and motives of engagement of professional advocacy institutions and networks. Frameworks in which Global South actors seek out and rely on the agency of Northern advocates to represent their interests in international contexts, such as the boomerang model (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 1999; De Waal 2015) are problematic because they propound the idea that norms and political resources and support flow from Global North to South, whereas, in reality, this exchange is more reciprocal and multidimensional (Müller-Funk 2019; Pallas 2017; Pallas University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 4 and Nguyen 2018; Pallas and Bloodgood 2019; Petrova 2013; Rodríguez-Garavito 2015; Tsutsui and Smith unpublished). Also, the prevailing focus of this scholarship on advocacy networks from the viewpoint of NGOs centres on an institutional level of analysis, overlooking the individual. While these factors remain salient in transnational politics to varied extents, the context in which they occur has changed as have the forms and functions of transnational activism itself. One major difference is that technological advances have collapsed communication barriers, making it easier for people in distant parts of the world to see, hear and engage with one another. Also, the grievousness of contemporary atrocities is inciting spontaneous responses by individuals compared to the more structured campaigns of NGOs. Further, increasing transnational mobility has expanded the agencies of Global South actors, making them less dependent on Northern advocates to represent them in Northern contexts. This combines with changing global norms about who has the right to speak for 'subalterns'.5 This study builds on existing scholarship on transnational activism through the lens of Bring Back Our Girls, an activism begun in Nigeria in 2014 by Nigerian women that attracted and compelled widespread global attention, action and support. 1.1 Research Question What does Bring Back Our Girls reveal about the structure, interrelations and motives for participation in contemporary transnational activism? University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 5 1.2 Objectives The main objective of this study is to signal new directions in transnational activism scholarship. To achieve this objective, the study adopts three approaches. First, it examines the case of Bring Back Our Girls, an activism begun in Nigeria in 2014 by Nigerian women that attracted and compelled widespread global attention, action and support. This enables a contribution to existing knowledge about new directions and dimensions of transnational activism from the standpoint of an African campaign led by women—two perspectives that are underrepresented in international relations and transnational activism scholarship. The study obtains activist perspectives from Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States as a way of comparing diverse cultural, social and political viewpoints and enabling theorisation from the South. Second, the study explores the structures of and interactions among the transnational actors who took part in Bring Back Our Girls in at least 50 cities around the world, focusing on the countries mentioned above. The aim of this is to show that the structure and operations of transnational activism have expanded from professional advocacy institutions and networks to include individual activists and informal groups who are motivated to participate by different sets of factors. Third, this study catalogues and critically interrogates the factors that motivated geographically dispersed individuals to participate in Bring Back Our Girls, with a view to theorising individual motivations of engagement and participation in transnational activism. This strengthens the nexus between individual motivations and the collectivist ones that dominate University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 6 international relations scholarship on transnationalism, owing to the disciplinary inclination toward group or meta theories. 1.3 Justification and contributions to knowledge Several scholars have noted the limited insights from the non-Global North in international relations that has translated into its overlooking of Global South knowledge (Acharya 2014; Acharya and Buzan 2007, 2010, 2017) and, specifically, African concepts, experiences and agencies (Bouka 2018, 2019; Obi 2012; Odoom and Andrews 2017; Smith 2012, 2017, 2018; Tieku 2012; Zondi 2018). This questions the internationality of international relations and compels efforts to theorise from the South, rather than engage in cyclical efforts to revalidate Eurocentric theories. It also speaks to the need for greater diversity and representation. This study contributes toward redressing representational deficits in international relations scholarship regarding the agency of individual African as against non-African and female actors that have drawn severe criticism of the limits of its relevance outside the Global North. By so doing, the study helps to invert the Eurocentric gaze of this scholarship and contributes toward decolonising the study of international relations—a key impulse of contemporary knowledge production and theorisation. By privileging the voices of African activists and telling the story of an activism created by Africans, this research brings African activisms into the purview of ‘mainstream’ scholarship and secures the place of Africa as a purveyor, not just a receiver, of transnational exchanges. This contributes toward a more objective view and holistic understanding of the dynamics of transnational activism. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 7 Much of the knowledge on transnational activism in international relations scholarship focuses on civil society organisations, particularly NGOs and formal networks. This extends a historic preoccupation with collective entities as primary units of analysis that does not recognise how ordinary people and citizens, specifically women, have become more active on global stages, including through activism. By examining a case of contemporary activism that does not fit neatly within existing typologies of social movement actors, this study expands this categorisation, illustrating that new forms of transnational activism like Bring Back Our Girls are characterised more by connectivities of highly diverse and diffuse individuals and organisations than by collective identities. This finding advances discourses on which actors have legitimacy, agency, power and presence to lead resistance and pursue social change in international spaces. By centering the perspectives of activists who supported Bring Back Our Girls in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, this study contributes to an epistemic shift from reading the transnational as global or vertical to reading it as including regional or horizontal transnationalisation. This illuminates knowledge and ways of knowing, as identified by proponents of epistemologies of the South (e.g., Santos 2018), that are largely silent in current discourses. By so doing, this study also deconstructs the South-North relationship of dependence as presented in existing literature and demonstrates how it is becoming more collaborative. Finally, although Bring Back Our Girls is the subject of a growing body of scholarship, this study is one of a very few studies that are based on primary data from interviews with Bring Back Our Girls activists in different geospatial contexts. It thus offers empirical insights from a range of geographically dispersed actors in and outside the Global South that expand the scope of perspectives from either Global North or Global South that characterises extant scholarship on University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 8 activism. The study highlights the involvement in Bring Back Our Girls of diasporan Africans, a further gap in knowledge within this scholarship, showing how these intersectional actors use their transnational agency to both further and constrain activism in their home contexts. 1.4 Overview of conceptual framework This study is guided by two approaches: constructivism-interpretivism and decoloniality. As an approach that “challenges conventional understandings” and questions “liberal assumptions of truisms” (Lynch 2013:9), constructivism-interpretivism creates space for meaning making from Bring Back Our Girls that is not constrained by prevailing concepts of transnational activism. It is allied with decoloniality which calls for a revaluing and re-situation of knowledge from historically marginalised geographies of place and power in the aim of producing knowledge that is more comprehensive and inclusive of diversity and difference. 1.4.1 Interpretivism According to Lynch (2013:2), interpretivism: ‘focuses on the meaning of human experience—the variations in possible meanings for given events, how meaning is made through knowledge construction, how power and ethics constitute meaning, the implications of meaning for political and social phenomena’. Interpretivism is critical to this study’s engagement of the transnational activism literature, given its focus on infusing and interpreting perspectives that have hitherto not been centred in IR knowledge on this subject, including gender, the Global South, informality and the transnational agency of the individual. Interpretivism is the impulse behind my questioning in Chapter Four of University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 9 whether the taken-for-granted term, activism, applies to Bring Back Our Girls or whether the group represents something more, since many of its participants did not only confront political authorities but actively engaged in providing relief and empowerment to communities affected by the Boko Haram conflict. I also use interpretivism as a basis for conceptualising Bring Back Our Girls as multimodal, compared with current models of activism that define separate categories of activism with distinct characteristics. As a field of knowledge, international relations faces renewed scrutiny concerning its partiality to Global Northern knowledge and ways of knowing (epistemologies), and their accompanying marginalisation of non-Northern narratives (Acharya 2014; Acharya and Buzan 2007, 2010, 2017; Zondi 2018). Tieku (2012), Smith (2012, 2017, 2018), Odoom and Andrews (2017) and Coleman and Tieku (2018) are among scholars who call out the invisibilisation of African IR knowledge. According to Acharya (2017), IR ‘is not yet a truly global discipline that captures the full range of ideas, approaches and experiences of both Western and non-Western societies’. Some critique the discipline’s gender bias, androcentrism or ‘malestream’ lens (Enloe 1990; Tickner 1997; Hudson 2005; Olonisakin, Barnes and Ikpe 2011; Hendricks 2015; Bouka 2018, 2019; Duriesmith 2020). Lynch (2019:268-9) argues that IR needs to confront its ‘racialised constructions and imaginaries’ that have historically constructed non-White, non-European and non-American people and knowledge as inferior. Collectively, these and other concerns embody the preoccupations of interpretivism as an approach to knowledge production. 1.4.2 Decoloniality The decolonial lens that informs this study stems from a critical evaluation of the nature of Africa’s historical and continuing relationship with the rest of the world. The purpose of taking a decolonial approach stems from the ongoing global decolonial turn in knowledge that demands University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 10 a re-viewing of who knows, what we think we know and the ways in which we arrive at that knowledge. Historically, across disciplines, Africa has been the site of extensive research by foreigners and yet simultaneously the subject of epistemic racism and erasure that have denied its traditional knowledges, its ability to know and its agency (Bates, Mudimbe and Barr 1993; Nyamnjoh 2017). This is what led Hountondji (2009:128), among other critical African and Global South thinkers to describe efforts by African scholars to rectify this marginalisation and orientalisation as ‘extraverted’ research that is externally oriented, intended first ‘to meet the theoretical and practical needs of Northern societies’. In considering the theoretical contributions of South Africa’s Must Fall movements, Mpofu-Walsh (2016:82-82) writes: To understand the Must Fall movement’s spread to Euro-America through the lenses of Gramsci, Foucault or Marx is already to misunderstand it. Certainly, ‘traditional’ theory can illuminate certain aspects of the movement, but it cannot capture its anti-hegemonic and unmistakable Southern bent. ‘Fallism’ is a nascent, complicated and emerging viewpoint, combining aspects of decolonial thought, black consciousness, radical feminism and pan-Africanism. He goes on to suggest theory from the South (Santos 2018; also Hountondji 2009 - épistemologies du sud) as a plausible explanatory lens through which to view the global spread of Must Fall. Beyond the African identities of many participants in Bring Back Our Girls, the campaign has been ideologically and structurally different from Must Fall. It appears to be just another contemporary transnational activism. Yet the decolonial ethic is a call to look beyond the surface University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 11 to see if, in this case, the Africanness of social phenomena can produce new knowledge or change how we see the world. In other words, it queries: what can be learned from studying things as they are and not as Western theories and worldviews see them? To cite one example, northern theories do not consider how concepts like Pan-Africanism, an African norm, can explain transnational activism. However, several of the activists whom I interviewed in Africa and the US stated that they supported Bring Back Our Girls because they identified with the group as Black women of African descent. It is in this light that this study set out to explore what new insights a study of Bring Back Our Girls could make to existing knowledge on transnational activism. 1.5 Operationalisation of Key Concepts 1.5.1 Activism Dictionary definitions of activism include: ‘the use of direct and noticeable action to achieve a result, usually a political or social one’ (Cambridge Dictionary online)6, and ‘the process of campaigning in public or working for an organization in order to bring about political or social change’ (Merriam-Webster).7 In the literature on transnational social movements, the word activism (Ilcan and Lacey 2013) is used interchangeably with words like civil society (Pallas 2010, 2013), advocacy (Keck and Sikkink 1999, Pallas 2013, 2017), campaign(ing), collective action (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005) and social movement (Martínez-Torres and Rosset, 2010; Riker and Sikkink, 2002). While these share some characteristics, they are not as coterminous as the literature suggests. Social movements are defined broadly as ‘a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target authorities’ (Tilly 2004b in Tarrow 2005:6), a definition that Tarrow points out does not fit all forms of transnational resistance. Advocacy conveys the idea of University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 12 organised, constructive engagement for change compared with the idea of activism as resistance and performative grievance that draws attention to issues but does not have transformative impact. Both are forms of collective action that are subsets of a broader constellation of social mobilisations by civil society. In this study, the word ‘activism’ refers to both the performance of political resistance and new forms of collective action that are common across the world today. I explore other framings of collective action and what import these have on perspectives of Bring Back Our Girls. 1.5.2 Transnationalism and transnationality Transnationalism is a multifaceted word that has been studied in different aspects by and across different disciplines (Vertovec 1999; Tedeschi, Vorobeva and Jauhiainen 2020), most prominently in studies on migration, regionalism and social movements. It has been variously defined as 'a social morphology, as a type of consciousness, a mode of cultural reproduction, an avenue of capital, a site of political engagement, and a reconstruction of ‘place’ or locality' (Vertovec 1999:1). Nye and Keohane (1971) popularised the concept of transnationality within international relations. They defined transnational relations as ‘contacts, coalitions, and interactions across state boundaries that are not controlled by the central foreign policy organs of government’. Their objective was to reconcile state-centric views of global politics with the ‘good deal of intersocietal intercourse…[that] takes place without governmental control’ (Nye and Keohane 1971:330-331). This view still finds salience today, especially in light of the increasing digitality of Bring Back Our Girls and similar movements, and how technological advances are shifting the frontiers of transnational political space. However, the intensive digitalisation of many aspects of international University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 13 politics, including activism, is expanding the focus of transnationalism beyond geographic state boundaries to include the sociopolitical space or ‘virtual counterpublic’ (Sabao and Chikara 2018) represented by the Internet, which exists ‘above and beyond national, regional, or local societies’ (Anheier 2007; Jordan 2011; Taylor 2002; Kaldor 2003). Within the context of activism by NGOs and NGO networks that dominated research in the 1980s and 1990s, transnationality is defined in three ways: transnationality of place (events occur in multiple geographic locations), transnationality of person(s) (activism involves people from or living in different countries or/and who hold transnational identities) and transnationality of purpose (activism themes have transnational resonance). Together, these privilege spatiality and national identities and affiliations of social issues, activisms and activists. An example of the first category is local-national actors like Nigerian NGOs lobbying non-domestic actors like the transglobal oil company, Royal Dutch Shell whose headquarters are based outside Nigeria. The second category references, for example, networking partnerships between domestic actors like Egyptian NGOs and global international INGOs like Human Rights Watch to address human rights issues in Egypt (Pallas and Nguyen 2018). The global appeal of fighting for the release of helpless girls forcefully taken by violent armed men, as Bring Back Our Girls did, illustrates transnationality of purpose. What is common to these definitions is that in both scenarios, activism occurs either across borders or/and involves multiple nationalities co-situated in one locale. This study adds to these scenarios the transnationalism that occurs when multinational or diasporic non- state actors mobilise either in a single domestic context or with other multinational actors across borders, as occurred with Bring Back Our Girls events in the study’s focal countries. Transnationality in this epistemological context (international relations) is contested by some on the basis that it is no more than activity that takes place across the borders of two states. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 14 For this reason, it is said to understate the broad range of spatialities in which supranational activisms occur (Anheier and Kaldor 2001:16; see also usage by Krause 2014). Anheier and Kaldor (2001) state that the word ‘transnational’ is antithetical to the term ‘global’ which implies the participation of people from every part of the world. This contrasts with the usage of transnational by other scholars (Pallas 2016; Ilcan and Lacey 2013; Della Porta and Tarrow 2005; Tarrow 2005; Khagram, Riker and Sikkink 2002; Keck and Sikkink 1999) to depict advocacy that occurs in different parts of the world, typically starting in one place and moving to others. ‘Global’ has been used anecdotally to denote the involvement of key Western and, sometimes, non-Western powers, in global phenomena like the #MeToo movement (Ajayi 2018b). Western observers deem this acceptable even if, as occurred with #MeToo, geopolitical spheres like Africa are not visibly represented in its spread. It is important here to acknowledge the import for spatial materiality in Africa of a concept that evokes colonial encounters across Westphalian geospatial borders that do not correspond with historic communal boundaries. Critical feminist scholars like Mohanty (1997b) and Grewal and Kaplan (1994, cited in Naples 2002:5-6) oppose the use of global to describe feminist movements on grounds that it universalises Western ways of mobilising, thereby eclipsing the diversity and agencies of women in other parts of the world (Akin-Aina 2012). The local-global nexus that undergirds each of these concepts is present in Cammaerts’ (2015) disaggregation of transnationality into three scales, namely trans-international, trans- national and glocal. However, his model fuses indicators of spatiality, local/national, regional, international, global, with the forms that activism takes. In sum, the common denominator to all these definitions is that the geographic borders of states determine what is transnational in the barest sense but there is disagreement about how well this term embodies activity at all trans-state University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 15 levels (regional, international, global). ‘Transnational’ is used throughout this study to mean activisms that: (a) occur in more than one country both within and across different geographic contexts (trans-African activism is as transnational as transglobal activism); (b) transpire in cyberspace, whether exclusively online or simultaneously online and offline; and (c) may be locally situated within a specific country but involve multiple nationalities or/and transnational targets. 1.6 Overview of Research Design and Methodology This is a summary of methodological approaches which are detailed in Chapter Three. Data used for this study were collected between March 2019 and September 2020 using a qualitative approach. Following a deep reading of the vast repertoire of work on transnational activism, I gathered the data presented in this study using semi-structured interviews with 27 women and men who led or took part in Bring Back Our Girls events in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and the US both physically using face-to-face interviews and digitally using WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook and Zoom. I interviewed Bring Back Our Girls coordinators as well as participants to obtain perspectives from different levels of activism. However, the absence of hierarchy in the amorphous structure of several mobilisations made the traditional concept of leader difficult to define and inapplicable to my methodology. I identified participants by conducting searches on the Internet (Google), Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for Bring Back Our Girls or Bring Back Our Girls and the name of each focal country (example, Bring Back Our Girls Ghana). Internet searches often led to media articles about the Chibok abductions, the website and other news about the activism in Nigeria, and University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 16 analysis of the activism’s effectiveness. Facebook searches led to pages by activisms in specific countries. I looked for the names of the administrators of each page or read posts by their followers to identify them. I then contacted them via Facebook messenger, email, WhatsApp or telephone, or combinations of all these. They were subsequently selected using purposive and snowball sampling. I also collected and analysed over 600 social media data items posted by and about Bring Back Our Girls activists on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Given the abundance of this data, the time frame was April to October 2014—the six months in which Bring Back Our Girls was most active. This social media content was then manually content analysed to identify the main themes therein. These were used to develop thematic codes that form the structure of the discussion of findings in Chapters Six and Seven of the changing structures and forms of transnational activism, and the reasons why people in different countries supported Bring Back Our Girls. 1.7 Chapterisation There are eight chapters in this study, beginning with this introduction (Chapter One). Chapter Two provides a background to the research that consists of the global and African political contexts in which Bring Back Our Girls emerged and a brief profile of the activism itself. Chapter Three comprises a detailed research design and methodology that included interviews with 27 activists in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and the United States, and content analysis of their social media communications. Chapter Four contains a review of international relations literature on transnational activism while Chapter Five juxtaposes this scholarship with knowledge from African Studies, psychology, sociology and communications/media studies, drawing on University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 17 them all to formulate a new model of contemporary transnational activism. Chapters Six and Seven present detailed findings and discussions in relation to the study's research question: Chapter Six focuses on the structure, form and interrelations of contemporary transnational activism, while Chapter Seven centres on the motivations of participants in transnational activism. The study concludes in Chapter Eight by consolidating the theoretical implications of the study’s findings and the contributions to knowledge of the transnationalisation of Bring Back Our Girls within the framework of elaborating theory from the South. Chapter Eight also provides indications for further research and makes policy-relevant recommendations. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 18 CHAPTER TWO A CONTEXTUAL OVERVIEW OF BRING BACK OUR GIRLS 2.0 Introduction This chapter situates Bring Back Our Girls in the multiple historical, social and political contexts in which it emerged. It begins with a historical overview of activism across borders from the 18th century to date that illustrates that Bring Back Our Girls continues a long history of transnational activism initiated and led by Global South actors. Empirical illustrations are drawn primarily from Africa and movements for Black emancipation. Examples include movements by enslaved Africans in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Anti-Apartheid movement, Pan-Africanism and Fallism, as well as indigenous rights movements in South America. A second section highlights key aspects of the moment in which Bring Back Our Girls occurred, namely: rising global activism and a backlash against democracy; Boko Haram, militarism and the global war on terror; the girling of development; feminism; and digital activism in the Internet age. In a third section, the chapter traces the emergence and development of Bring Back Our Girls and its significance within Nigeria and the broader global political and gender moment and contexts in which it emerged. This chronology of events prefaces the more detailed analysis of Bring Back Our Girls in the study’s focal countries (Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, the US) in Chapter Six. 2.1 A Historical Overview of Transnational Activism Social movement scholars historicise activism mainly by type or theme using a wave analysis to define what they see as major phases in the history of transnational activism. This University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 19 section uses both while bearing in mind the difficulty of identifying a verifiable starting point and separating purportedly old from new social movement actors, many of which have co-existed throughout history. Some analysis suggests that transnational activism is a modern phenomenon that became more visible in the 1980s (Khagram, Riker and Sikkink 2002; Pallas 2018). This is a consequence of the predominant focus of much Global North scholarship on formal advocacy organising, predominantly by Northern actors, specifically non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which obscures its view of other forms. NGOs and NGO-led advocacy became more prominent in the 1980s (Obadare 2012), but transnational activism is a historic phenomenon that dates as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries, to the series of uprisings by enslaved Africans, more commonly known as ‘rebellions’, in the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2020)8. These have not been counted in social movement scholarship because they are characterised as ‘the most backward and fragmentary form of social defiance’ (Santiago-Valles 2005:51). Their exclusion is further rationalised on grounds that they were not organised in a ‘globally conscious manner’ and did not ‘include deliberate coordination’ across multiple geographic spaces (Santiago-Valles 2005:51). This appears to be the reason that mainstream literature does not acknowledge informal anti-slavery efforts by Africans in Britain or initiatives like the Sons of Africa organisation formed by African abolitionists, Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano. The latter was made up of different West Africans who organised together to address common problems and engage British political actors and other abolitionists in the movement to end slavery (Adi 2018:7). Tarrow (2005:65-68) questions the transnationality of the 146 austerity protests that broke out in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East and Africa from 1976 to 1992, stating University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 20 that there was no evidence of ‘transnational networks or solidarities’ or ‘unified organisation’. Quoting McMichael (1990:386), Santiago-Valles (2005:53) counters: The problem with this perspective is that such linkages “presume a ‘whole’ that governs its ‘parts,’” rather than an approach that “progressively constructs a whole as a methodological procedure by giving context to historical phenomena.” In other words, because uprisings by enslaved people were not analysed in historical context, they were not considered to be either transnational or to constitute activism because they did not fit into hegemonic frames. In Santiago-Valles’ expansive view, conscious connectedness is ‘only one form that such globally connected resistances can take’ (Santiago-Valles 2005:55). He argues that the slave uprisings were global and transnationally connected in the multinational identities of participants as well as the global nature of enslavement and the global impact that the resistance of enslaved people had in Africa, the Americas and Europe (Santiago-Valles 2005:55). These uprisings or ‘subaltern rebellions’ represent the earliest form of what Santiago-Valles terms ‘Afro-diasporic’ resistance (Santiago-Valles 2005:51) that has recurred throughout history and is discussed in more detail later in this chapter. In the mid-19th century, there emerged an Anti-Slavery Coalition in which diverse actors, mainly from Europe and the Americas, mobilised to bring an end to the horrors of the slave trade (Keck and Sikkink 1999:92; Anheier and Kaldor 2001; David 2007). David (2007:368-9) distinguishes this from the less formal and structured anti-slave trade network that existed from the mid- to late 18th century and was more transnational in constitution. Gopal (2019) points out University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 21 that the formal abolitionist and decolonisation movements, or ‘imperial initiative’, continue to be credited with the liberation of the British empire, despite ‘an abundance of histories of resistance’. Klotz (2002), for example, foregrounds the idea of social movements as transnational actors using a comparison of the abolitionist and Anti-Apartheid coalitions comprising advocacy networks, international organisations and corporations. In his study on transnational advocacy in the 18th century, David (2007:370, 378-9) examines the role of Quakers of which many leaders of the anti- slavery network were members, although the network later expanded to include Anglican and Methodist denominations. David examines how Quaker theology and thought about the moral injustice of slavery informed their involvement and the organisational links among members in America and England. He notes that numeric quasi-parity among members on both sides of the Atlantic meant that neither was superior (David (2007:372) and marks this ‘organised’ mobilisation as the onset of modern transnationalism (David 2007:369). Under the rubric of metro-colonial activism, with a focus on humanitarian activism, De Waal (2015:24) cites non-violent resistance by Gandhi in South Africa and India; the campaign by the French-born British journalist, author, pacifist and politician, Edmund Morel against King Leopold of Belgium’s misrule in Congo, and the transnational campaign against the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia. Gandhi and Morel illustrate the body of historical work on the figure of single individuals—political entrepreneurs or norm leaders in Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) conception—as transnational activists, which Tarrow (2005) captures in his concept of rooted cosmopolitans. Pan-Africanism is often discussed as a driver of national independence movements across Africa from the 1940s to 1970s, but it began life as a transatlantic movement in the late 19th century (Abdul-Raheem 1996) with the agitations of the descendants of enslaved Black people in the University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 22 diaspora to reunite with Black Africans on the continent (Mboukou 1983). Adi (2018:3-4) conceptualises this as two distinct strands, with one emerging from the African diaspora and the other in the context of the anti-colonial struggle, thereby showing the diversity and transnationality of Pan-Africanism’s leaders and supporters. Its early thinkers were diasporan Blacks, including male and female figures like George Padmore, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Amy Ashwood and Amy Jacques Garvey (Blain, Leeds and Taylor 2016:140), among others, and initial meetings took place in Europe (Malisa and Nhengeze 2018). Though the women cited above are known as prominent female pillars of Pan-Africanism, women as a whole have been excised from the movement’s history, yet they were and remain vital participants in Pan-Africanist movements across the world, as demonstrated in dedicated volumes by Feminist Africa (2014, 2015) on feminism and Pan-Africanism. African women’s invisibility from documented histories and narratives is the work of embedded gender biases and gendered disparities in the politics of knowledge production (Tsikata 2014: 97; Tamale 2020:2-4). Their erasure serves as an imperative to study movements by women in order to provide accurate records of history as well as enrich knowledge on activism from diverse perspectives. The principles of Pan-Africanism are being rearticulated in Black Lives Matter and a global decolonial movement that gained renewed momentum with the Rhodes Must Fall protests in South Africa in 2015. The Anti-Apartheid movement is a major pillar of anti-colonialism and has been brought to life through transnational organising by varied organisations, as well as by global protests, such as those against the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 when South African police shot and killed demonstrators in the township of Sharpeville protesting against the Apartheid regime's racist 'pass' laws (Lodge 2011). The Must Fall movement began in 2015 when Black South African university student, Chumani Maxwele threw human faeces on the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, the University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 23 imperialist British businessman and politician at the University of Cape Town, in protest against the continued sense of disempowerment among the country’s Black population (Luescher 2016:22; Nyamnjoh 2015:74). It then inspired other Fallist movements across the world, including in Northern countries (Nyamnjoh 2015, 2016; Adomako Ampofo 2016; Luescher 2016:239; Wamai 2016; Ramaru 2017:94; Kambon and Appiagyei-Atua 2018; Sagar 2019). Fallism can be considered an ally movement to Black Lives Matter and thus part of a long and continuing global movement against the racial oppression of Black people everywhere (Adomako Ampofo 2015, 2016). The next identifiable phase in the trajectory of transnational activism occurred between 1940 and 1960 with intercontinental organising at home and abroad (colonies and metropolitan centres) among anti-colonialists in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and leaders of the American civil rights movement. De Waal (2015:25) describes the ‘ambivalent’ relationships between anti-colonial movements and Northern human rights organisations, including between leaders of African and civil rights movements that embodied ‘remarkable transcontinental solidarity and shared ownership’. In a model that looks like a precursor of Keck and Sikkink’s famous boomerang model, De Waal shows how Southern actors sought the support of Northern actors to pressure colonial governments (De Waal 2015:25). Yet his depiction of the structure of this relationship in Figure 1 shows only relations between Southern independence movements and Northern advocacy organisations; it omits the transversal exchanges among Global South activists documented by Nkrumah (1963:132-140) and many others.10 Anti-colonial transnational activism was succeeded, in turn, by transnational movements against neo-colonialism in the 1970s, and human rights, war/militarism and University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 24 economic hardship/structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s. As is discussed below, the relationships and power dynamics among Northern and Southern actors, as well as the organisational structure of transnational activism modulated in each period. To cite one example, Italian nuns worked alongside the parents of schoolgirls abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army during Uganda’s civil war in the late 1980s in a transnational activism that linked them with the United Nations system (De Temmerman 1995, 2000; Cook 2007) and Figure 1: Anti-colonial solidarity model (De Waal 2015:25). American and European political actors (De Temmerman 1995, Cook 2007).11 During Liberia’s protracted wars from 1989 to 2003, religious and diaspora groups were actively involved in the peace processes that ended the war, although, as Afolabi (2017:3, 158-171, 173-175) points out, the Liberian diaspora role was multifaceted and ambivalent. The transnational women’s peace movement led by the Women in Peace Network and the Mano River Women’s Peacebuilding Network that was so instrumental to brokering peace talks among warring factions is well documented (Fork Films et al 2008; Gbowee 2009; Medie 2016:3; Afolabi 2017). Western advocacy organisations Southern independence or political movement Defining the issue, demanding actions setting priorities and narratives Colonial government Pressure BLOCKED Pressure through public, press, parliamentarians University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 25 In South America, transnational environmental and human rights organisations supported initial resistance by indigenous communities like the U’wa of Colombia that evolved into transnational political and legal confrontation of state governments over the exploitation of natural resources in their homelands (Rodríguez-Garavito and Arenas 2005). The most recent epoch in transnational activism began in the early 21st century with movements like MeToo that began in the US. Global media presented MeToo as a catalyst for similar protests by women all over the world, including parts of Africa (Akoob and Allison 2018; Burke 2018; Busari and Idowu 2018; Nunn 2018). Ajayi (2018b) points out the saviourism inherent in this framing and its dismissal of the established national and transcontinental movements against gender violence across the continent. From a Global North perspective, this period is marked by the change in direction of transnational activism from South-North to North-South as advocacy became increasingly driven by professional lobbyists who specialised in pleading the causes of distant suffering others with Northern governments and political actors. Examples include Kony2012, the campaign by the American NGO, Invisible Children, that aimed to ‘make Kony famous’ in the aim of getting him arrested (Mamdani 2012; Schomerus 2015). Activisms like this appropriate the agency of Southern actors to organise on their own behalf (Ogunlesi 2014), as discussed by Khoja-Moolji (2015a, 2015b) in her exploration of what she calls the Western feminists’ ‘takeover’ of Bring Back Our Girls and their subalternisation of the Nigerian activists who started it. They also effect the imposition of Northern cultural and political agendas on other parts of the world, as Mamdani (2009, 2012) discusses in his critique of the Save Darfur Movement, in which he asserts that the Lord’s Resistance Army is ‘a Ugandan problem calling for a Ugandan political solution’ (Mamdani 2012). This period has also witnessed University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 26 a resurgence of a Fourth Wave of transnational feminist and women’s rights advocacy. The Women’s March of 2017 is one instance, although it stands out from other Northern-origin activisms in that it started as a national American protest and spread to other parts of the world. From a Southern perspective, renewed fervour against autocratic governments and political leaders across Africa led to a wave of uprisings that started in North Africa and spread across parts of the Middle East, that have been conceptualised by corporate media as an ‘Arab Spring’ (Manji 2011:1). Writing in a volume on transnational feminism within the uprisings, Sadiqi (2016:1) remarks the complexity of defining North Africa and notes how the use of northern Africa in Northern mainstream literature indicates an association with Middle East and Mediterranean civilisations. Italian authors Camozzi, Cherubini, Leccardi and Rivetti (2017:1) acknowledge the inaccuracy of the Arab labelling but use it for referential convenience, often calling it the ‘so- called Arab Spring’ (see also Labidi 2016:195-6; Arfaoui 2016:221). Much of the existing analysis, predominantly by Northern and Arab scholars, is unquestioning of this labelling and contributes to a historic epistemicide against native Blacks in the region (Della Porta 2012). Some scholars, notably Afro-Arab ones, are more critical and reflective of the mixed heritage of northern Africa, the intersectional identities and interests of those who took part, and the orientalist and Eurocentric tendencies of some research to conflate the region with contiguous Middle Eastern countries (Shihade 2012; Shihade, Fominaya and Cox 2012; Sjoberg and Whooley 2015; Sadiqi 2016; Elattir, El Allame and Tihm 2016; King 2019). Others note how the Arab label excises the synchronous uprisings in other parts of Africa, including Zimbabwe, Senegal, Madagascar, Mozambique and Uganda, that together form a collective response to experiences of multifaceted dispossession shared over many years (Manji 2011:1, 7, 11). According to Manji University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 27 (2011:1), the world did not witness an Arab Spring but an ‘African awakening’—a concept that Branch and Mampilly (2015) echo in their book, Africa Uprising. Branch and Mampilly (2015:2-3) argue that this obfuscation of Africans’ political agency reflects a historic and continuing dismissal and legitimisation of the continent’s protests as too primitive to constitute valid sites of activism research. African agency is further erased in light of the involvement of native Black groups and Black African migrants who have sought greener pastures or/and transit to Europe through North Africa (King 2019). Its other effect is to highlight the compression of the initiators of the uprisings as though they are homogenous groups, whereas they represent multiple identities, as studies on intersectionality in the Women’s March indicate (Fisher, Dawn and Ray 2017; Moss and Maddrell 2017; Presly and Presswood 2017; Heaney 2019; Moni 2019). 2.2 Outlining the Context of Bring Back Our Girls Bring Back Our Girls is viewed by many as a women’s movement for girls’ rights in Nigeria. Closer scrutiny reveals that it interpellates several themes, given the context in which it occurred. In this section, the study discusses (i) rising global activism and a backlash against democracy; (ii) Boko Haram, militarism and the global war on terror; (iii) feminism and the girling of development; and (iv) digital activism in the Internet age. 2.2.1 Rising global activism and a ‘backlash against democracy’ Bring Back Our Girls emerged in the aftermath of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’12 in 2010, a period that coincided with the onset of the fourth wave of global democratisation marked by popular democracy movements and varied efforts by states to become ‘functional electoral democracies’ University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 28 (Hussain and Howard 2013; Abushouk 2016).13 This narrative was triggered by uprisings that began in North Africa and spread across the continent and the ways in which they confronted and forced varying levels of reconfiguration of historically authoritarian governments. Mass-based individualised resistance surged as governments across the world tightened restrictions on organised civil society and narrowed the space for civic dissent and disobedience (Mamattah 2014)—what Elone (2013) terms a ‘backlash against democracy’. The appearance of movements like Los Indignados or 15 May Movement in Spain, Black Lives Matter and MeToo in the US, and People Power in Uganda compelled research and theorising on the growing global autonomy and agency of individuals as drivers of political change. Yet analysis of the spontaneous and anomalous nature of these movements—Castells (2014) calls them rhizomatic—occurred largely outside the corpus of social movement scholarship, ostensibly because they did not fit existing typologies. 2.2.2 The Boko Haram conflict, militarism and the global war on terror Some accounts trace the creation of the group known as Boko Haram to its founding in 2002 by Mohammed Yusuf. Others argue that it was formed as a non-violent group in 1995 by Abubakar Lawan and taken over while he was away studying in Saudi Arabia (Madike 2011; Ogbonnaya, Ogujiuba and Stiegler 2014; Onuoha 2014). A detailed insider account can be obtained from a 2018 book by the Islamic State in West Africa Province, a faction of Boko Haram (Zenn 2018; Al-Tamimi 2018). The name Boko Haram, loosely translated as ‘Western education is sin/forbidden’, is said to have been coined by Northern corporate media and is a distortion of the group’s ideology that ‘Western elites and their ways of doing things contradict Islam’ (Thurston 2018:16). Its stated aim is to establish a regime whereby Sharia law is applied throughout Nigeria (Onuoha 2014:3-4), but in some ways it represents frustration at decades of University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 29 misrule by politically corrupt leaders and is entangled in Nigeria’s complicated history (Matfess 2017; Ajayi 2020). The group has committed sporadic violence against state and civilian targets since 2003. This escalated in 2009 when police killed 13 of its members during a funeral procession, allegedly for not wearing motorbike helmets (Onuoha 2014:4). This triggered retaliatory attacks across northeast Nigeria that ended with the police arrest and extrajudicial killing of Mohammed Yusuf, which drove the group underground and saw the emergence of a more radical leader, Abubakar Shekau. A splinter group known as the Islamic State West Africa Province emerged in 2015 under the leadership of Musa Al-Barnawi that directs its violence against the Nigerian military, not civilians (Stoddard 2019). In the deadly violence by both factions, tens of thousands have been killed, thousands of women, girls and men abducted, and millions displaced in Nigeria and neighbouring countries (Onuoha, 2010, 2011; International Crisis Group, 2010, 2014; Zenn and Pearson, 2014). Boko Haram has directed different forms of systematic violence against women and girls as a prominent tactic of war throughout the conflict (Zenn and Pearson 2014; International Crisis Group, 2016, 2019; Matfess 2018; Ajayi 2020). In addition to the violence of abduction/disappearance, the group has weaponised women and girls as suicide bombers, sex slaves, forced wives, teachers of its ideology, weapons’ smugglers, combatants and recruiters. Wide-ranging violence against women and girls has been a prominent tactic of war by Boko Haram throughout the conflict (International Crisis Group 2016, 2019; Ajayi 2020). The Chibok abductions were only one among many others that began long before the conflict started in 2009 (Pereira 2018, Ajayi 2020) but they gained international prominence, arguably from being the largest single and most spectacular abduction at the time. As discussed below, Boko Haram’s University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 30 gendered violence reflects the normalisation of violence against women and girls during conflict which represents the continuation of such violence in militarised non-conflict contexts. Boko Haram has reported transnational networks that are believed to have facilitated its spread and cross-border affiliations that make it a transnational phenomenon (Onuoha 2014; Isike and Isike 2018). Working with neighbouring governments in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin regions affected by the conflict, as well as countries like the US, the UK and France, Nigeria’s government has fought hard to suppress and discredit Boko Haram, and appeared to gain military victory in 2018. This triumph was short-lived, however, as sporadic attacks throughout 2018 intensified in November 2018, causing a cycle of fresh violence throughout 2019. The geographic spread of Boko Haram and of the violence it has perpetrated show that although conflict has changed from inter- to intra-state, it still has wide transnational consequences (Onapajo et al. 2012; Onuoha 2014). 2.2.2.1 Rising global terror and a transnational counterwar According to the Global Terrorism Index 2019, though terror-related deaths halved in the last four years, the number of affected countries is growing and far-right extremism and terrorism is rising. Terrorism is a controversial concept that defies common definition, but the practice of violence as politics is a historical phenomenon that has affected different parts of the world in different ways at different times. Prominent examples include revolutionary violence in 19th century Russia, the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ and Islamist violence in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and northern Nigeria, among others. At a global level, concern over threats to US allies which escalated following terror attacks on US soil in September 2011 gave rise to a global war on terror. Since that time, the US has University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 31 worked with other ‘counter-terror hegemons’ [mainly the United Kingdom] (de Londras 201914) to build a ‘transnational counter-terrorism order’ or political economy of counter-terrorism (Rosendorff and Sandler 2005 in de Londras 2019), made up of ‘legal, institutional, technical and political manoeuvres’…‘intended to instantiate on a global level an arrangement of social life that promotes certain goals or values’ (de Londras 2019). In this framing, acts of terror and anyone who supports or prosecutes them are bad and must be dealt with severely—an idea that has been repeatedly articulated through rhetoric and action until it has attained the status of global norm. Resistance to terror is seen as a motive for Bring Back Our Girls as several affiliated mobilisations in different countries issued statements condemning human rights violations related to state encounters with terror and other forms of mass violence. US newspapers’ coverage of Bring Back Our Girls framed the Boko Haram crisis as ‘a potential new front in the US’ ongoing war on terror’ (Ofori-Parku and Moscato 2018:2491), mirroring American sentiment and explaining the government’s militarised response. At national levels, groups designated as terrorists, including Kenya’s now defunct Mau and Nigeria’s Boko Haram, have sparked debate about the legitimacy of their claims. Some see the Mau as embodying resistance to violent colonial occupation while Boko Haram is also partly viewed as an expression and performance of grievance against the historical marginalisation of northern Nigeria’s poor. Yet the trope of terrorism as bad dominates global discourses and informs responses by state and non-state actors alike—including the headhunting and killings of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi15, and other heads and members of groups designated as terrorists or seen to be sympathetic to their causes.16 All forms of terror increase women’s and girls’ vulnerability and precarity to sexual violence, and thus arouse strong feelings. So, too, does the conflation of terror with Islam and University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 32 radical Islamists, which feeds the idea that women and girls in affected countries need saving or Northern protection against violent, angry Muslim men. This was the impulse behind the global movement to save Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman condemned to death by stoning for committing zina (adultery) in Katsina State, northern Nigeria in 2002 (BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights 2003; Pereira 2019).17 The global uproar became so disruptive that Nigerian activists issued a statement correcting erroneous facts and requesting a pause (BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights 2003). All of this is undergirded by white saviourism, a moral code that normalises interventions, whether humanitarian or military, to save oppressed people from themselves (Kemedjio 2009 in Lynch 2019:278; Cole, 2012). White saviourism is also feeding thinking and practice around objections to Muslim girls’ education—mostly by men—and positioning education as a solution to various challenges (Khoja-Moolji 2015b). Khoja-Moolji (2015b:348) writes about the ‘comfortable fit between the narrative of the [Chibok] abductions and an ‘all too familiar trope of the threat of Muslim terrorists, especially towards women’. This restates Abu-Lughod’s earlier thesis in the context of the Middle East (2002, 2013) that Northern narratives about saving Muslim women reduce them to a stereotyped singularity that obscures complicated historical and political dynamics, and the ways in which would-be saviours’ policies and actions can contribute to difficult lived realities of those whom they purport to save (Abu-Lughod 2013).18 Not all the Chibok students are Muslim, but the concept of their salvation as grounds for supporting Bring Back Our Girls and justification for military intervention is no less relevant. 2.2.2.2 Gender and the militarisation of politics This study defines militarism as not just its association with war and armies, though Nigeria has a long history of military rule and violence—but its core ideology that constitutes ‘powerful University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 33 norms of masculinity and femininity (Baderoon 2015), and is marked by an increasing willingness to use violence to enforce gender [and other] ideologies of appropriate behaviour and appearance (ibid) : ‘the military and its expenditures…and the related socio-cultural, ideological and material changes…in societies…undergoing militarization. The conceptualisation of militarism applied here extends beyond the conventional focus on the security sector, security institutions and weaponry, to include changes in all aspects of social organization and subjectivity, including gender relations’ (Mama and Okazawa-Rey 2012). the use of the threat of violence to settle political conflicts; the legitimization of state violence; the curtailment of freedom of opinion; the domination of military values over civilian life; the violation of human rights, extrajudicial killings, and the gross repression of the people (Chunakara 1994 in Ekine 2008). Despite the absence of military rule in many countries, military tactics are apparent in democratic civilian governments’ adoption of military tactics, attitudes and mindsets, equipment and language. Rising global militarisation is both a legacy of historical military trajectories and a symptom of the prevailing global malaise regarding terror(ism). States’ militarised responses to this threat are creating new forms of insecurity for disempowered groups, especially women and threaten to revoke the gains of many years of women’s rights activism (Mama 2012). Nowhere is this more manifest than in northeast Nigeria where the gloomy gender relations that characterise Nigeria are more pronounced and entrenched (Pereira 2019). Evidence of rising militarism abounds across Africa in multiple instances of excessive violence by state security actors against unarmed civilians, particularly women. These include the 2010 public gang rapes of women protesters in Guinea; police killings of striking miners in Marikana, South Africa (2012), and University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 34 brutalities against students protesting campus rapes and high fees (2015/6); heavy shows of police force during the Occupy Ghana protests (2014); Burundian police shootings of protesters in 2015; police teargassing of protesters in Kenya and Egypt (2016); police intimidation and harassment of Bring Back Our Girls protesters in Nigeria from 2014 to 2016, and arrests and killings of Oromo protesters in Ethiopia (2016) and rapes and further violence in Tigray in 2020/1. In a recent journal article, Ajayi (2020) argues that the Chibok abductions are emblematic of a systematic campaign of violence against women and girls. In Nigeria, this has been led in the northeast chiefly by Boko Haram and other criminal elements but also by state security personnel. Successive Nigerian governments have been violent to or/and dismissive of Bring Back Our Girls and other women’s mobilisations as well as women’s security concerns overall. Together, these are a reflection of the normal gender dynamics in militarised contexts as outlined earlier (Oriola 2017). Emerging in this context, Bring Back Our Girls thus represents an important symbol of female and feminine resistance to a global militarised assault against the female gender and female bodies. 2.2.3 Women’s organising, feminism and the girling of development In some ways, Bring Back Our Girls continues long histories of women’s organising globally, notably across Africa, against a range of issues—some related specifically to women, like the Aba Women’s ‘War’. These are discussed at length in Chapter Four. Bring Back Our Girls emerged in an epoch characterised by women’s activism that is led by younger women and carries forward this legacy in a more aggressive way that some have described as fourth wave feminism (Ajayi 2018a). Especially in Africa, the emergence of all-women groups like Female IN (formerly Female in Nigeria) and PepperDem Ministries (in Ghana), and the growing spate of digital University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 35 feminist platforms like Eyala Blog, msafropolitan.com and the Africa Young Feminist blog Sauti, signal a change in the doing of feminist politics on the continent. However, it is unclear whether Bring Back Our Girls can be considered feminist solely because it was created and led mainly by women, supported by some feminists and fought primarily for the rights and rescue of kidnapped schoolgirls. Gouws (2015) and Gouws and Coetzee (2019) note the definitional dilemma involved in defining women’s movements and distinguishing them from overtly feminist ones, even though the two are commonly conflated. While they tend to be based on women’s gendered experiences of a range of issues, women’s movements may or may not be feminist, depending on their stance toward patriarchy. In Gouws’ (2015) view, a feminist movement ‘uses a gendered power analysis and contests political, social and other arrangements of domination based on gender’. Notwithstanding, Bring Back Our Girls does represent an important instance of women-led activism and a lens through which apathy toward issues concerning women and girls, especially in Nigeria, can be observed. This is especially so given the depth of rejection, ridicule and resistance that many female members faced from family, friends and broader society because their activism was seen as defying gender stereotypes about appropriate behaviour for women.19 Bring Back Our Girls emerged a few years after an international focus on extremist violations of girls’ and women’s rights as illustrated by the shooting in Pakistan of Malala Yousafzai, who was vocal in her support of Bring Back Our Girls and led a solidarity visit to the group in Abuja in July 2014.20,21 In a comparative analysis of global reactions to the shooting of Pakistani activist, Malala Yousafzai and the Chibok abductions, Khoja-Moolji (2015b:87) observes that where the development ecosystem has focused since the early 1970s on ‘the potential of women in the Global South to combat poverty and promote development’, the figure of the girl has recently replaced that of women as catalysts for development and poverty alleviation. In this University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 36 narrative, girls in the Global South—alternatively, Black and Brown girls—are seen as panaceas to development challenges like poverty and violence if they can access Northern education: girls often appear as “promissory objects” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 38)—that is, a range of promises from the alleviation of poverty, elimination of terrorism, societal progress, to family harmony, egalitarian families, and so forth accumulate in the figure of the girl. Even though the exact content of these promises may differ across cultures, geographies, and socioeconomic classes, it is the figure of the girl that emerges as a broad category that subsumes these differently constituted promises and desires. This transforms girls into objects with which our futures seem to be tied, thereby producing a social consensus around the need to protect and nurture girls. (Ahmed 2010:38, cited in Khoja-Moolji 2015:95). This shift in focus from women to girls in the Global South rests on the assumption that access to education will empower girls to take decisions that will lead to greater autonomy and ‘ultimately bring their nations out of abject poverty and violence (Khoja-Moolji 2015b:88). This has led to various development actors promoting girls’ education as the solution to varied development challenges (Khoja-Moolji 2015b:88). This is a sea change from colonial Nigeria where concern for the welfare of girl street hawkers led to interventions to make them housewives compared to education and vocational support for boys (George 2018). Yet it is a simplistic proposition that does not take into account the structural and systemic nature of gender discrimination in affected societies. The issue of girls’ education in northern Nigeria has long been of interest to activists and policy makers. One third of all girls are out-of-school in Nigeria—over 5.5 million school-age girls (British Council 2014:20). Across the board, girls’ literacy and numeracy rates are far lower University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 37 in the northeast and northwest compared to the southwest, with ‘all Southern regions having significantly higher rates than Northern regions’ (British Council 2014:21). Primary-secondary transition rates and dropout rates follow the same patterns (British Council 2014:20-22). Educational (e.g., accessibility, safety) and socioeconomic (e.g., poverty, child work) barriers contribute to these disparities. Sociocultural factors (gender norms and stereotypes, early marriage and pregnancy) also play an important role. In this context, the Chibok abductions revived historic debates about the educational access and status of girls in northern Nigeria as well as public attitudes to these issues in different parts of the country. 2.2.4 Digital activism in the Internet age Digital politics has taken different forms since the Internet debuted in the 1970s. However, the extensive use of modern digital and social media in contemporary activism has been remarked as a major characteristic that distinguishes political resistance today (Castells 2014, Mutsvairo 2016). Recent forms of digital or cyberactivism, enabled by the growing spread of mobile technology and Internet access, have included hashtag activism, selfie protests, clicktivism and hacktivism, among many others. Across the world, all the movements that have occurred since the North African uprisings, including MustFall, MeToo, Occupy and Women’s March, have involved significant online activity to varying effect. The South African MustFall movement ignited protests against academic racism in the US and UK, among other spaces. Tunisian political analyst, Youssef Cherif credits Facebook and Twitter with raising awareness and helping supporters of the uprising in that country find their voices and lose their fear, knowing that they could speak without state censure online (Jamjoom 2015). Bring Back Our Girls used social media to counter false state narratives about the toll of casualties in the Boko Haram conflict (Akume 2014). MeToo similarly University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 38 used social media to draw attention to movements against gender violence, though broadcast media narratives were dismissive of such movements outside the US (Ajayi 2018). At national levels, Facebook and Twitter discourses helped sack Vice President Sam Sumana in Sierra Leone while in Kenya, Kenyans on Twitter used mockery, condemnation and humour (Nyabola 2016; Okoth 2020), like Nigerians used memes22 to denounce corruption and confront other political anomalies (Yeku 2018). In many cases, online activism is believed to have helped mobilise hundreds of thousands of participants globally who made virtual noise and participated in offline protest activities. This has made resistance more global and fluid, and arguably facilitated interpersonal interactions among diverse actors in geographically dispersed spaces. It has also given room to arguably greater citizen power and voice, particularly by persons who would not normally have access to transnational public spheres. Yet, inasmuch as cyberactivism has helped intensify the visibility of, and therefore support for, new transnational movements, the synergy between online and offline activism shows that the digital has not replaced the analogue. In Chapter Four, this study debates the implications for scholarship of this development, noting that it is making more visible the agencies of non-Western actors for initiating political change and influencing transnational contentious action. It is worth noting that in the expanding knowledge production on digital or cyber activism, African cases remain minimal. There is thus room to explore how African digital activism contrib