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3 - “Herdsmen Are Terrorists”

Analyzing News Headlines on the Herder–Farmer Conflict in the Nigerian Press

from Part I - Conflict Discourse in Newspaper Reporting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2022

By
Innocent Chiluwa ,
Isioma M. Chiluwa  and
Angie O. Igbinoba
Edited by
Innocent Chiluwa
Innocent Chiluwa
Affiliation:
Covenant University, Nigeria
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Summary

This chapter argues that the discursive construction of the herders as terrorists exacerbates suspicion and fear in herder–farmer relations and further destroys the prospect of peace in Nigeria. Applying a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to analyze the representations of the main actors in the conflict, 175 news headlines of seven popular Nigerian broadsheet newspapers were studied. The study reveals that the herdsmen are consistently constructed as terrorists, as violent actions such as unprovoked attacks and killings are attributed to them. However, the farmers are constructed as non-violent and as the victims. Hence, the press explicitly constructs the herder–farmer conflict in terms of the “killer-herdsmen” script with which the herders are generally evaluated.

Keywords

discourseheadlinesrepresentationsmediaherdsmenfarmersNigerian press
Type
Chapter
Information
Discourse, Media, and Conflict
Examining War and Resolution in the News
 , pp. 69 - 92
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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