ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the landscape of Lake Chad in the aftermath—and sort of crystallization—of the ‘crisis’, when Boko Haram and state armies escalated the confrontation. The chapter explores how the lives, experiences, and also the territory were altered by the ‘crisis’ by looking at different phenomena and on a different scale. It starts by interrogating the uses (and misuses) of the state of exception decreed in the region, specifically the one by the Chadian government, to shed light on an increasingly perturbing element of war-fronts, the so-called peace-keeping economy. Adopting a vernacular point of view, the chapter discusses the notion of development and the politically and morally charged construction of the ‘terrorist menace’ by pointing to differences and similarities to the 1970s and 1990s rebellions that developed on Lake Chad. The concepts of ‘security’ and ‘modernity’ are then scrutinized to understand the variables that have pushed many dispossessed and disenfranchised young men from the Lake and its archipelago to join Boko Haram. The chapter concludes with a biographic fragment that illustrates the up-and-downs of fortunes by Lake Chad in the last (more or less) 30 years, and points to the necessity to study decision-making processes, such as the act of joining or not a rebellion on Lake Chad, from a vernacular security point of view.
