@phdthesis{Klaassen2026,
  author    = {Klaassen, Jan Folkert},
  title     = {Global Bourdieu and Nigeria - Studying African Perspectives on (In)Security},
  url       = {https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:gbv:579-opus-1013715},
  school    = {IRC-Library, Information Resource Center der Constructor University},
  year      = {2026},
  abstract  = {(In)security in Africa influences African societies, geopolitics, and geoeconomics. Yet African perspectives on (in)security are rarely sought, and how African states shape their security policies remains unclear: conventional internal/external, domestic/foreign, and secure/insecure distinctions are outdated, while Western/Northern-centric social sciences and African Studies/IR literatures remain trapped in essentialisms, stereotypes, and mono-causal explanations. This thesis argues for new analytical devices to study African security policies in less essentialist and more context-sensitive ways by understanding the practice turn and appropriating Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive, practice-theoretical, and field-analytical sociology through an in-depth sociospatial reading. This helps interpret his concepts as global, interrelated thinking tools for African social formations, against a superficial Bourdieusian International Studies literature. Taking Nigeria as exploratory case study, the thesis traces how field and habitus intersect, develops a Field of Nigerian Security Policy (FNSP) as object and tool, and treats habitus and capital primarily as outcomes of the analysis. It asks how Nigeria shapes its security policy towards Boko Haram as a contemporary space of (in)security, drawing on almost four months of self-reflexive, ethnographic fieldwork. It combines sociological discourse analysis of textual sources with interviews with leading Nigerian experts and practitioners. It reveals how a FNSP is constituted by diverse agents, relations of (informal) cooperation, competition, domination, and transversality, a dual habitus of problems/scarcities and aspirations/necessities, and multiple (including negative) kinds of capital—and how agents' classificatory practices ultimately produce Nigeria's security policy towards Boko Haram. The thesis thereby advances African International Relations theoretically and offers deep practical insights into Nigeria's political space.},
  language  = {en}
}