Critical Discourse Analysis of German-Nigerian Bilateral Trade Agreements: Language, Power, and Asymmetry

This study applies critical discourse analysis to a corpus of German-Nigerian bilateral trade agreements, economic partnership documents, and joint communiques signed between 2015 and 2024, examining the role of language in constructing, legitimising, and potentially reproducing power asymmetries in the bilateral economic relationship. Germany is Nigeria's largest European trading partner, and the language of the formal documents governing this relationship carries significant implications for how economic obligations, conditionalities, and mutual commitments are framed and interpreted. The study draws on a corpus of 20 publicly available bilateral documents, analysing them using Fairclough's three-dimensional critical discourse analysis framework, which examines textual, discursive practice, and social practice dimensions. Findings reveal systematic patterns of asymmetric agency construction, in which Nigerian obligations are framed in more prescriptive and conditional language than German commitments. The study also identifies the consistent prioritisation of German-defined technical standards and regulatory frameworks in the language of market access provisions. Critical reflections on the implications of these discursive patterns for Nigerian trade policy are developed. The study recommends the training of Nigerian trade negotiators in critical language analysis and the establishment of a language review stage in the bilateral document drafting process. Keywords: critical discourse analysis, German-Nigerian trade agreements, bilateral relations, language and power, trade policy.