📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
This study presents a critical discourse analysis of media representations of the farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria's Middle Belt, examining how language constructs ethnic identities, assigns blame, and frames political responsibility in newspaper and online media discourse about a crisis that has caused thousands of deaths and significant displacement. The farmer-herder conflict is one of Nigeria's most serious security challenges, and its media representation has been identified as a factor in the escalation and perpetuation of violence, yet systematic linguistic analysis of how media discourse constructs the conflict remains limited. The study develops an original analytical framework integrating van Dijk's sociocognitive discourse theory, Fairclough's dialectical-relational approach, and Wodak's discourse-historical method. A corpus of 500 media texts from national and state newspapers covering the conflict between 2019 and 2024 was compiled and analysed for ideological structures, in-group and out-group categorisation, metaphorical framings of the conflict, and discursive legitimation and delegitimation strategies. Findings document systematic patterns of ethnic criminalisation in certain media outlets, with Fulani herder communities consistently constructed as aggressors through a restricted set of metaphorical schema, while farmer community violence is framed as defensive and proportionate. The study makes an original contribution to the discourse analysis of ethnopolitical conflict in Nigeria and recommends media discourse auditing frameworks for conflict-sensitive reporting standards. Keywords: critical discourse analysis, farmer-herder conflict, Middle Belt, ethnopolitical conflict, media representation.
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