Abstract
This article explores relations between popular protests and institutional politics in a petroleum-dependent economy. The 2012-protest against fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria was one of the biggest popular mobilisation in Nigeria’s history, and possibly the largest in the wave of protests in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article uses perspectives of contentious politics that bridge structure and agency through a focus on relational dynamics between protests and institutional politics. This article makes four interrelated claims of how the protests are conditioned by and contribute to institutional politics: First, the protests builds on a historical trajectory of labour-led subsidy protests that in itself form part of institutionalised politics. Second, the 2012-protests were historically large due to the particular context of a decade of democracy and oil-led growth, without a popular sense economic justice and real political participation. Third, while new actors came to the scene in 2012, intra-movement fragmentation exposed trade union and civil society weaknesses and failure to build a sustained social movement. Fourth, the 2012-protests inspired civic agency and influenced institutional politics and state-citizen relations, especially reflected in party politics and elections.
Highlights
Just over a decade into Nigeria's democracy and economic growth related to the international oil boom, the 2012 protests against the removal of fuel subsidies were among the largest popular mobilisations in the country's history
Beyond probing the protests’ specific outcomes, such as policy reform or politicians’ resignations, this article has shown that popular mobilisation has a dynamic relation to policy processes and their outcome
None of the historical fuel subsidy protests altered the system, but they contributed to shifts in popular ideas, civic action and institutional politics
Summary
Just over a decade into Nigeria's democracy and economic growth related to the international oil boom, the 2012 protests against the removal of fuel subsidies were among the largest popular mobilisations in the country's history. As much as the 2012 protests were historically significant, most analyses only indirectly link them to institutional politics and emphasise their temporal character and limited impact. This article explores how the fuel subsidy protests relate to institutional politics before and after 2012 It does so from the perspectives of contentious politics, which consider historical, relational, and dynamic processes involved in claims making, collective action and politics. Through this lens, this article will reveal that the protests had a deeper impact on political institutions and petroleum governance than has been acknowledged. We show that, in contrast with the 2012 protests, the large
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