Maritime Domain Awareness and Coastal Insurgency in Nigeria's South East

Abstract

The historiography of Nigeria's southeast seemed to have overlooked its geographical peculiarities as an area awash with maritime features and vulnerable to maritime based crimes in the form of coastal insurgencies. The paper located Nigeria's Southeast in the context of the extant relationship between maritime domain awareness and coastal insurgency. It identified the maritime domain of the southeast as thriving in the "gray area" between criminal activity and armed conflict necessitating a range of military operations. The paper argued that Nigeria's southeast suffered all the trapping of coastal insurgency manifested in varying dimensions of maritime threats. It identified this to thrive upon weak maritime domain awareness (MDA) made possible by the wholesome combination of weak state capacity, governance capacity, location of strength gradient, ungoverned/ungovernable spaces, and vulnerability quotient.