Recently I read an interview with the President of Niger, the francophone country to the north of Nigeria, about Boko Haram, the Islamist group that kidnapped more than 200 Nigerian girls and threatened to sell them into some kind of slavery. President Mahamadou Issoufou said, by way of explanation, that “poverty is the principal ally of terrorism.” Is this really so? There are plenty of very poor places in the world that are free from terrorism, so poverty is not a sufficient condition for it; whether poverty is a necessary condition depends on the definition of poverty that you use, … Continue reading Magical Thinking