The Involvement of Terrorist Organisations in Human Trafficking: Boko Haram Operations in Borno State, Nigeria

Human trafficking within the Boko Haram insurgency has commonly been treated as a humanitarian consequence of armed conflict. This article argues instead that trafficking functions as a deliberate instrument of insurgent strategy, operating simultaneously as a method of territorial control, a mechanism of force generation, and a revenue stream. The study employs a qualitative case study design, triangulating semi-structured interviews with 26 participants, comprising survivors, humanitarian practitioners, community leaders, and security officials, against institutional documentation from United Nations agencies, financial intelligence bodies, and human rights organisations. Analysis followed reflexive thematic procedure with an explicit triangulation protocol under which divergent institutional figures are reported as ranges with their methodological sources identified. The findings establish four structural features, namely the planned and target-selected character of abduction operations, a consistent gendered allocation of victims to sexual servitude or to combat and logistical labour, an established geography of forest holding sites and cross-border transfer, and the documented tactical deployment of victims including as bombers. The article reports verified metrics conservatively, distinguishing counts of children used in attacks from counts of female bombers, since the two categories derive from different definitions and are not additive. The theoretical contribution is the demonstration that conflict theory, crime and terror analysis, and feminist political economy each capture a necessary dimension of the pattern while none is sufficient alone.