Assignment/Activity Title— Boko Haram in Nigeria (Briefing) Year— Junior

Skill— Critical review, organization of findings, synthesis Portfolio Competency— Social Awareness

I found that the briefing on Boko Haram and the group’s influence on the state of Nigeria incredibly
interesting and helped me learn a lot about a country where I had no real sense of what was going on. As it
stands, Boko Haram is a terrorist group primarily located in Nigeria, and for this short essay, I held the
responsibility of contacting Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, and filing a briefing report on how the
situation with the terrorist organization should have been handled. It was my duty to complete such a task by
applying the same knowledge gained and lessons learned from the reading of Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
Most of the issues I had with the assignment spawned from my lack of preparation and not allowing
myself an adequate amount of time to write, edit, and re-write the piece. My most noticeable shortcomings in
the essay were not discussing the applied principles of Sun Tzu’s writing to the context of the current political
climate of Nigeria. Although I handled the concepts of Sun Tzu well apart from the real-life application,
examples that I stated were often nebulous and strange sounding to a point where it may had been better if I
didn’t include them and re-wrote in some nicer, more concisely stated ones.
My lack of time management is partly to blame for this. I had read the vast majority of the Art of War,
but didn’t really take any time prior to when I started writing to think about which principles I believed would
hold the most ground in my argument presented in the briefing. I had to come up with them as I was writing,
which meant that there was a lot of room for improvement for transitions and blending them all into one,
controlled argument. On top of that, I didn’t allow myself much time for edits to be made, so it essentially is
just short of a second draft, which in my opinion was pretty sloppy of me.
While completing this assignment, I felt truly ashamed of myself that I didn’t know enough about Boko
Haram initially to be able to complete the assignment. This was expected, so research was required for every
brief that I as well as my fellow students made. I did not know the origins nor did I understand the reasons for
why the organization existed.
I am not socially aware of most terrorist organizations across the world. I’m only barely familiar with a
select few, mainly being the most well-known to the United States (which would be al-Qa’ida). The completion
of this assignment really showed me how vast and expansive the ideals of terrorism spread. A few google
searches into the assignment I started to get curious about how many terrorist groups exist, and I was able to
find a list of over 100+ groups recognized as terrorist organizations by at least on national government that
possesses a nationally recognized terrorist group listing.
As astonishing as this information was to me at the time, I now know to look at different political
perspectives with an outside lens, and not just to acknowledge both sides to a terrorist force, but to keep in
mind every country’s experiences with a certain issue before I confront an issue. This way, bias will not show
as easily and everybody’s opinions can be taken into account, leading to a fairer and more accurately
described social depiction that is aware of all stances and viewpoints.

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