Partisans and Participants: Democracy, New Media, and Nigerian Diaspora in New Zealand

Abstract This article argues that in the era of neo-liberal globalization there has been intensification in the movement of goods, people, and capital across national boundaries. Our ethnographic studies of Nigerian immigrants in New Zealand point to the dispersal of Africans with very active partisan roles in their homeland democratic developments. This African transnationalism, as will be seen in the case of Nigeria, is made possible and sustained by developments and transformations in the media where today new Internet-based media enable Africans abroad to play a central, partisan, and participatory role in democratic developments in the same way as those residing on the continent. The article will also argue that through the unfolding mediation new terms and acts of citizenship have been imposed on transmigrant Africans.