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Email: jannik.schritt@tu-berlin.de
The research this article is based on was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the project ‘Oil and Social Change in Niger and Chad’ (2011–2017) which was based at the universities of Goettingen, Halle and Mayence (Germany). I thank my interlocutors in Niger, the project team members and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
INTRODUCTION
Protests and riots around a diverse range of issues – including service delivery, public holidays, religiously connoted events, elections and legislative amendments – have been on the increase in Niger since 2013. These protests and riots reveal similar patterns of composition, mobilisation and domination, having typically been carried out by disaffected young men, mobilised by actors from the political opposition, and coordinated through the media technologies of the radio and the mobile phone. In framing the protests, mobilising actors have typically drawn on historically shaped collective identities and narratives around, amongst other things, Islam, internal East–West rivalries, negative notions of national politics, and neocolonialism.
In this article, I analyse dis/order in contemporary Niger, particularly through the lens of my ethnographic observations of protests around the inauguration of the country's first oil refinery in 2011, and through an analysis of the protests and riots in the months and years that followed. Using the notion of dis/order, I describe the socio-political configuration of Niger as it became visible through the chronology of protest events. I understand protest events as ‘social situations’ that, if studied over a longer process and in relation to each other, can reveal both representative patterns of society and its changing dynamics (Gluckman 1958; van Velsen 1967). Based on 13 months of multi-sited fieldwork in Niger between 2011 and 2014, I apply the situational analysis or extended case method to extend out from my participant observation of the oil refinery's inauguration ceremony and the events that followed it to look at the broader context of Nigerien politics and society (for more on the extended case method in protest research, see Schritt 2019a). By doing so, I identify the following key drivers in the recurrent protests: new media and politics by proxy, political machines, the social and political embeddedness of civil society, ethnicity and regional political strongholds, rhetorics of neocolonialism, Islamic reform...