Nigeria’s Grand Strategy: Existence, Coherence, and Contradictions in Africa’s Most Complex Foreign Policy

This dissertation addresses the foundational question of whether Nigeria possesses a coherent grand strategy, understood as a systematic linkage of ends, ways, and means in the pursuit of core national interests, and if so, whether that strategy has been consistently translated into foreign policy practice across administrations from 1999 to 2024. The concept of grand strategy has been applied extensively to great powers but is rarely applied systematically to African states, creating a significant gap in both comparative grand strategy literature and African foreign policy scholarship. Drawing on grand strategy theory, comparative foreign policy analysis, and the political sociology of foreign policy-making, this study develops an original analytical framework for assessing grand strategy coherence that accounts for the specific institutional, fiscal, and political constraints facing African middle powers. The framework is applied to Nigeria across six presidential administrations through a combination of documentary analysis and elite interviews, examining the interaction between stated strategic priorities in official documents and observed foreign policy behaviour across five domains. Primary data are drawn from National Security Strategy documents, presidential foreign policy speeches, Ministry of Foreign Affairs annual reports, Central Bank and DMO fiscal data, and semi-structured interviews with former national security advisors and foreign ministers. The dissertation argues that Nigeria possesses a proto-grand strategy, a set of recurrent strategic intuitions about regional leadership, continental status, and non-alignment, that is insufficiently institutionalised to produce consistent strategic behaviour across administrations, and that this strategic incoherence is itself a product of rentier state political economy rather than mere policy failure. Keywords: grand strategy, Nigeria, foreign policy coherence, national security, Africa.