“Weak State”, Regional Power, Global Player: Nigeria and the Response to Boko Haram
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the literature explaining Nigeria’s failure to counter the Boko Haram insurgency since 2009 has focused on the country’s internal governance, drawing on variations of the “weak state” concept. In this article, we argue that analysts also need to examine Nigeria’s international relations for a more critical explanation of why it took over five years to eventually halt the violent group’s territorial expansion and regular commission of atrocities. Through analysis of primary documents from various institutions involved in responding to Boko Haram between 2010 to 2015, and elite interviews with academics, security officials and other analysts, this article argues that Nigeria’s relatively powerful regional and global positions effectively precluded coercive international intervention and, in doing so, reduced external pressure on Abuja to act more decisively to counter this major threat to security at the human, national and regional levels. Thus, we demonstrate that so-called “weak” states that are simultaneously powerful internationally can manage pressure for action on violence occurring inside their borders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".