Governing Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism in Nigeria

This thesis examines how the Nigerian state is transformed, reshaped, and reconfigured by diffusion of the global preventing and countering violent extremism (PCVE) agenda. Departing from scholarship that sees counterinsurgency as a mode of governance which requires military action and management of socio-political thought, the PCVE scholarship that focuses on outcome-centric evaluations, best practices and effectiveness of programming, as well as the 'Nigerianist counter-radicalisation' literature that has remained fixated on analysis of secondary policy discourses, the thesis approaches PCVE through a governance lens, and advances the notion of 'PCVE governance', as a conceptual lens to unpack the multidimensional range of actors, institutions and discourses through which violent-extremism policy is produced, implemented and contested. Drawing insights from critical security and terrorism studies, and using semi-structured interviews with state officials, security services and civil-society organisations, participant observation of PCVE fora, and discourse analysis of policy texts, the thesis advances three interconnected claims. First, the initial coordinates of Nigeria's PCVE governance emerged from its architectural landscape which is characterised by endogenous and exogenous attributes; a combination which produced fragmented, state-centric policy landscape in which early PCVE frameworks were side-lined in favour of more politically visible kinetic responses. Second, upon institutionalisation, PCVE became cognitively captured by security agencies whose colonial-era militarist worldview reads violent extremism primarily through the lens of "radicalisation", deterrence, and thereby relying on coercive capabilities and standardising programmes around securitisation rather than social transformation. This epistemic posture ensures that PCVE remained affixed within the tropes of "coloniality of violence," thereby foreclosing the community-driven orientations originally promised by the preventive turn. Third, the resulting governance field is simultaneously crowded and asymmetric: civil-society organisations are welcomed rhetorically under a "whole-of-society" banner yet kept peripheral to core policy and deradicalisation work, while security agencies vie internally for ownership and resources under the guise of 'whole-of-government'. CSOs therefore deploy tactical agency-leveraging specialist expertise and donor rapport to influence from the margins-but remain constrained by state-defined parameters, bureaucratic securitisation, and turf wars. In essence, the thesis contends that sustainable and genuine prevention efforts for violent extremism will require teasing out the power geometries that undercut its governance. The thesis contributes fresh empirical evidence from the Global South, while also refining securitisation theory. It demonstrates how the process of securitisation travels and adapts in contexts beyond those where it was originally theorised, particularly on issues such as security governance. Specifically, highlighting how securitising actors may simultaneously embody multiple roles within a single securitisation cycle; functioning as the security issue, existential threat, referent object, accepting audience, and enactors of extraordinary measures.