Michael Watts’ lecture focuses on two home-grown insurgencies in Nigeria: Boko Haram, a radical Islamist movement located in the dry and arid northern Muslim heartlands, and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), arising from the largely Christian oil-fields of the southeastern rainforests. Each insurgency, Watts argues, arose from common failures of state, civic, customary and religious authority, and from the material, political, and economic insecurities produced by the failure of national secular development.