Everyday Insecurity, Religious Life, and Global Narratives: How Southwest Nigerians Interpret Violence Beyond the Language of Genocide

Recent U.S. political and advocacy discourse, including statements by Donald Trump, has labeled violence in Nigeria a “Christian genocide.” This paper argues that the genocide frame does more than misdescribe events. It reorganizes them. Drawing on eight months of research in Southwestern Nigeria, I show how residents interpret killings and kidnappings through overlapping logics of banditry, land disputes, electoral rivalry, and state neglect rather than sectarian extermination. Violence is lived as chronic insecurity, not religious annihilation. Yet transnational advocacy networks and international media compress this complexity into a single story of persecution, hardening Christian Muslim boundaries that are often fluid in practice and redirecting moral claims and resources. The analysis combines Nigerian media analysis, discourse analysis of U.S. reports and advocacy materials, and event level conflict data from ACLED, and treats naming as a social process with measurable effects, challenging genocide narratives as analytic defaults in the sociology of religion.