Discursive construction of the farmer-pastoralist conflict in Nigeria

The farmer-pastoralist conflict (FPC) in Nigeria has aggravated in recent years. It generated intense debate between 2015 and 2018 because of the aggravation of the conflict and the increased fatalities associated with it. This paper analyses the media representation of the conflict. Data were newspapers’ editorials and regular columnists’ stories and supplemented by government and independent bodies’ reports. Newspapers, as agents of popular culture, play a critical role in the propagation of various discourses of the conflict which seek interpellation and are also contested. This paper shows that the discourse is dichotomous and conflictive between ecological reasoning and ethnic-regional and religious imaginations.