Sound, Identity, and Resistance: The Role of Music in Nigeria’s Pro-Democracy Movements from 1983 to 2023

This research undertakes a comprehensive historical and musicological investigation of the role of music in Nigeria's pro-democracy movements and political resistance episodes from the return to military rule in 1983 through to the EndSARS protests of 2020 and post-democratic contestations up to 2023. Music has served as a critical vehicle of political dissent, consciousness raising, and collective identity formation throughout Nigeria's turbulent political history; however, no systematic musicological study has traced this relationship across the full arc of the relevant period. This study combines archival historical research with musical analysis and oral history methodology. Sources include recorded protest songs, radio broadcasts, underground recordings, newspaper archives, and oral testimony from musicians, activists, and political observers. Musical analysis examines compositional strategies, lyrical rhetoric, genre choices, and performance contexts used in specific political episodes including the pro-democracy campaigns against Babangida and Abacha regimes, NADECO-linked music production, and the digital protest music of the EndSARS generation. The study draws on political musicology, social movement theory, and postcolonial Nigerian historiography. Findings will produce an original, comprehensive account of music's function in Nigerian political resistance, theorising music as a form of political infrastructure in conditions of democratic struggle. Keywords: Protest music, Nigerian democracy, political resistance, historical musicology, social movements.