Departures Podcast with Drew Hinshaw

In April 2013, in a distant corner of Nigeria, a terrorist group kidnapped some 300 schoolgirls, eventually igniting a global advocacy campaign that brought an unprecedented level of international attention to the country. This global attention, which involved interventions by Western intelligence agencies, military advisors, and a plethora of aid NGOs, has not necessarily always resulted in success.

The Wall Street Journal reporter Drew Hinshaw, along with his co-author Joe Parkinson, has published a fascinating deep dive into this incident under the title “Bring Back Our Girls: The Untold Story of the Global Search for Nigeria’s Missing Schoolgirls.”

Hinshaw and Parkinson write that the kidnapping of Chibok girls represented “not just a story about a remote tragedy-stricken town in Nigeria, but a parable and perhaps a cautionary tale about the flawed interconnected workings of our butterfly’s-wings world.”