The conflict now is in a very confusing place where you have these gangs that are out to make money and increase their power, through cattle rustling and mass kidnapping for ransom — of school children especially — and general raiding, looting. In many ways you have terrorism.
James Barnett is a Fulbright scholar and a researcher at the Center for Democracy and Development in Nigeria.
In this podcast he joins New Lines’ Rasha Elass to talk about how he became interested in the underreported crisis of Nigeria’s bandits, how he managed to convince the warlords to talk to him, and what it was like to sit down with such dangerous men.