Although international media houses have focused on Boko Haram as the biggest contributor to violence in northern Nigeria, ethnic conflict has caused significantly more casualties in the past few...Show moreAlthough international media houses have focused on Boko Haram as the biggest contributor to violence in northern Nigeria, ethnic conflict has caused significantly more casualties in the past few years. This instability has been exacerbated by increases in criminality, terrorism, desertification, and drought that has changed land-use patterns. I argue that the rapid increase in access to Information and Communication Technologies, and especially social media, has created violent conditions by enabling discursive warfare in online spaces, where incendiary rhetoric circulates and is consumed faster than older media forms like newspapers or radio. Using the concept of cultural violence (Galtung 1990) as an umbrella term, this thesis will discuss how the presence of prominent societal norms and ideas legitimize violent discourses and dangerous speech online, which are continuously reinforced and reproduced. In Nigeria, online discourses reveal how dominant beliefs and ethnic labels have become so embedded within the culture that they function as absolute and remain uncontested. As these ideologies spread exponentially on social media, alongside other fake news or misinformation from local news organisations, this has the potential to normalise direct violence. My thesis will focus on this discursive warfare online, and will not attempt to explain how or whether it translates to direct violence because the ramifications of cultural violence are often not immediately visible, but persist and prevail more insidiously, over a longer period of time.Show less