Mediating justice: Youth, media, and “affective justice” in the politics of Northern Nigeria

Abstract

Recent protests across North Africa and the Middle East testify to public outrage at the failure of postcolonial states to produce "justice" in their governance structures. Attempts at the federal level in Nigeria to enact justice and institute accountability have led to changes to the Independence Constitution of 1960 in 1963, 1979, 1989, and 1999, to the deregulation of capital in the 1990s and the primacy of the market, and to demilitarization, in 1999, coinciding with democratic elections. Inflation in the 1990s, and unprecedented levels of poverty and insecurity that accompanied these efforts, mediated and refracted in political allegations of blame, galvanized Christian and Muslim reformist networks, as well as groups of armed youths who use violence to control the means of coercion. These armed groups gain advantage in conflicts over state and national sovereignty, the control of public space, and the appropriation and distribution of resources, their views and actions defining imaginings of Nigeria in national, transnational, and social media (Abbink and Kessel 2005; Adebanwi 2005, 2008; Akinyele 2001; Baker 2002; Casey 2007, 2008, 2009; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Mbembe 2001; Nolte 2004; Obadare 2006; Pratten 2007; Smith 2004, 2007). As the implementation of Shari’ah criminal codes in northern Nigeria, and regime change in the context of the Arab Spring confirm, young people have the capacity to reform and enact diasporic, micronational, national, and transnational forms of "justice," exerting extraordinary public pressure for governmental change.