‘We're now the Walking Dead’: Predatory Policing, Youth Agency and Framing in Nigeria’s #EndSARS Social Activism

Abstract

ABSTRACT The #EndSARS protests swept through Nigeria in October 2020 providing opportunities for Nigerian youths to demonstrate against police violence, poor governance and daunting socio-economic challenges plaguing their country. Drawing on the protesters’ collective sentiments on Twitter, this article interrogates youth agency, ethics of force in policing and collective action of #EndSARS protest actors against predatory policing. It examines the deployment of digital affordances in protest movements and discusses how #EndSARS protesters initiated frames of collective action, agency and injustice to identify problems, ventilate their grievances, attribute blame, mobilise themselves and articulate solutions. Using the cultural theory of social movements, it argues that the protesters enacted frames through discursive strategies to express ideological views and achieve specific purposes. The article further employs Ruth Wodak’s discursive paradigms to investigate the dynamics of in-group and out-group categorisations in #EndSARS protest movement. The discursive mechanisms are also employed to study the creation of stereotypes, legitimisation of protest acts and mobilisation of aggrieved Nigerians against police brutality.