Performing Protection: State Gender Rhetoric and Women's Rights in Nigeria
Conference paper
American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Boston, September 2026
Nigeria says a great deal about protecting women, and says different things depending on who is listening. This paper analyses the state's own protection rhetoric across the Chibok and Dapchi abductions, using a corpus of twenty-five texts spanning international, domestic and policy registers under two administrations. It finds the rhetoric is audience-segmented: the register offered to donors and treaty bodies differs systematically from the one offered at home. It then tests that rhetoric against a panel of security, education and displacement outcomes for Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, where the numbers barely move. The argument is protection without audit: commitments are produced constantly and verified almost never.