IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/fswixx/v35y2024i3p453-477.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

‘Only a tree stands still to be cut down’: discoursing legitimation in narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra war and the IPOB movement (1967 to present)

Author

Listed:
  • Adeiza Isiaka

Abstract

At sixty years, the Biafran movement has evolved, with actors and narratives shaped by new demographics, discourse modalities, and ideologies. While its most compelling leaders – Ojukwu and Kanu — share a secessionist goal, Kanu’s rhetoric is widely perceived as diverging from his forebear’s. With frameworks in discourse studies, I explore wide-ranging topoi of legitimation in Ojukwu’s chronicles of the Nigeria-Biafra war, and a corpus ofliberationist narratives by Kanu, leader of the present-day IPOB. I show that the resurged movement remains a clone of the old, united by insurrectionism and the various propagandist tools that have become indexical of the secessionist struggle.

Suggested Citation

  • Adeiza Isiaka, 2024. "‘Only a tree stands still to be cut down’: discoursing legitimation in narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra war and the IPOB movement (1967 to present)," Small Wars and Insurgencies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 35(3), pages 453-477, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:fswixx:v:35:y:2024:i:3:p:453-477
    DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2024.2304902
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09592318.2024.2304902
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/09592318.2024.2304902?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:fswixx:v:35:y:2024:i:3:p:453-477. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/fswi .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.