Dinah Lawan

Dinah Lawan is a PhD candidate in the department of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research sits at the intersection of political violence, civilian agency, and local governance in Sub-Saharan Africa. She is broadly interested in how ordinary civilians organize themselves to survive and respond to conflict—particularly what people do day to day when they face enormous violence, the state is unable to protect them, and the threat is immediate and ongoing. Her dissertation focuses on Borno State, in northeastern Nigeria, where civilians have endured over a decade of sustained violence at the hands of Boko Haram—a fundamentalist Islamist terrorist organization that emerged in Maiduguri in the early 2000s—and its affiliate, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). Drawing on fieldwork in Chibok Local Government Area and other communities across Borno State, her research traces the full range of strategies civilians have employed to protect themselves from violence, with particular attention to non-militarized forms of civilian self-protection—how these strategies emerge, how they are implemented, and what impact they have on the violence itself. Her work contributes to broader debates on civilian agency, local governance under conflict, and the conditions under which communities build protection from below. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Dinah earned a B.A. in Political Science with minors in Peace Studies and Studio Art (Ceramics) from the University of Notre Dame.