Towards an Original Theory of Post-Colonial State Failure in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Nigeria’s North East Geopolitical Zone

This dissertation develops an original theory of post-colonial state failure in sub-Saharan Africa, using the progressive governance collapse in Nigeria's North East geopolitical zone, specifically Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa States, as the primary empirical anchor. Existing state failure theories are predominantly grounded in Cold War-era comparative politics scholarship that inadequately accounts for the compounding effects of colonial institutional distortions, resource competition dynamics, and the security disequilibria produced by insurgency. The dissertation employs a three-phase sequential mixed-methods design: a systematic review of 150 sub-Saharan state failure studies; a seven-year longitudinal qualitative study drawing on 80 elite and community-level interviews; and a quantitative test of the proposed State Failure Accumulation Model using administrative performance data from 2016 to 2023. Qualitative Comparative Analysis and structural equation modelling provide the primary analytical tools. The proposed theory identifies six necessary conditions for post-colonial state failure: colonial institutional incongruence, identity fragmentation, administrative capacity atrophy, resource governance failure, legitimacy erosion, and security disequilibrium. The dissertation makes original theoretical contributions by extending Migdal's State-in-Society Framework and Herbst's theory of African state building to fragile sub-national contexts. Policy implications focus on sequenced state reconstruction interventions. Keywords: post-colonial state failure, sub-Saharan Africa, North East Nigeria, QCA, state-building theory.