Dr. Brandon Kendhammer
A new book on Boko Haram co-authored by Dr. Brandon Kendhammer, Associate Professor of Political Science at Ohio University, is a social history of one of Africa’s deadliest terrorist groups and its impact on Nigerian political and social life.
“Drawing on years of research, Boko Haram is a timely addition to the acclaimed Ohio Short Histories of Africa,” according to the Ohio University of Press website. “Brandon Kendhammer and Carmen McCain—two leading specialists on northern Nigeria—separate fact from fiction within one of the world’s least-understood conflicts. Most distinctively, it is a social history, one that tells the story of Boko Haram’s violence through the journalism, literature, film, and music made by people close to it.”
With details from Boko Haram’s small-time origins in the early 2000s to its transformation into one of the world’s most-recognized terrorist groups, continues the website, “this remarkable short book tells the story of Boko Haram’s bloody, decade-long war in northeastern Nigeria. Going beyond the headlines, including the group’s 2014 abduction of 276 girls in Chibok and the international outrage it inspired, Boko Haram provides readers new to the conflict with a clearly written and comprehensive history of how the group came to be, the Nigerian government’s failed efforts to end it, and its enormous impact on ordinary citizens.”
Kendhammer’s research and teaching interests are in the area of Nigerian politics, political Islam, and ethnic politics. His first book, Muslims Talking Politics: Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria (University of Chicago Press, 2016), explored the emergence of popular demands for the expansion of Islamic law in new Muslim-majority democracies, while other research focuses on the perils of ethno-religious power sharing in uncertain African democracies.
Kendhammer has lived and conducted research in Cameroon and Nigeria and was a Fulbright Fellow in Nigeria in 2007-08, based at Usmanu Danfodiyo University in Sokoto.
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