Audu Bulama Bukarti

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Audu Bulama Bukarti is a Nigerian lawyer, public intellectual, and reform advocate who focuses on security, governance, and justice in Africa. He currently serves as the Vice President of Programs and Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) and Deradicalization at the Bridgeway Foundation.

Born in Bukarti town, Yobe State, Nigeria, Bukarti began his education at Bukarti Primary School. He earned a Nigeria Certificate in Education in 2005 from the College of Education Gashua. He studied law at Bayero University Kano from 2006 to 2011, earning an LLB in Common and Islamic Law. He was called to the Nigerian Bar in 2012 after attending the Nigerian Law School. He later completed an LLM in 2016 at Bayero University Kano and a PhD in Law at SOAS, University of London, with a focus on Boko Haram, the laws of war, and humanitarian law.

Bukarti started his career as an Assistant Senior Accounts Officer II at Karasuwa Local Government in Yobe State, a role he held from 2003 to 2013. From 2014 to 2018, he taught law at Bayero University Kano, supervised undergraduate research, and practiced law with a focus on human rights, employment law, and medical negligence.

In 2017, he joined the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change as Sub-Saharan Africa Analyst, later becoming a Senior Analyst in the Extremism Policy Unit and a senior non-resident at the Africa Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His research concentrates on violent extremist groups in sub-Saharan Africa, and he has written extensively on their history, ideology, and strategy, deradicalization and reintegration, and responses to COVID-19. His work has appeared in outlets such as Foreign Policy, The Independent, The Telegraph, CNN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and War on the Rocks, and he has been cited by The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Reuters. He has given interviews to BBC World Service, Sky News, France 24, Voice of America, Al Jazeera, and TRT World.

Bukarti is an opinion columnist for Daily Trust, northern Nigeria’s largest newspaper. He is recognized as a leading expert on extremist groups and on Nigeria’s counterinsurgency efforts, advocating for comprehensive strategies that include deradicalization and rebuilding communities. He has faced threats from Boko Haram and other militants, including a public video threat from Boko Haram and threats from the bandit Bello Turji. He lives in London, is married with children, and is writing a memoir titled Into the Well.