The recent pro-Biafra protest across Nigeria has become an important topic in the news media where it has been constructed in different ways. Existing studies on media construction of protest have examined framing, speech acts and rhetorical strategies. However, adequate attention has not been given to the discursive representation of the 2015 and 2016 pro-Biafra protest. This study therefore examined the discourse strategies and the ideological inclinations of news reports on the 2015 and 2016 Biafra protest. Van Leeuwen’s representation of social actors and Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) serve as the theoretical underpinning of the study. Data were purposively drawn from four widely read and circulated Nigerian newspapers, The Punch, The Sun, The Vanguard and The Nation which allocate sufficient space to the coverage of the protests. The period covered was between 2015 and 2016, a period where the protest was most intense in the country. Three representational strategies which include ‘protesters as freedom fighters’, ‘protesters as economic saboteurs’ and ‘protesters as law-abiding citizens’ were discovered in the study. Ten strategies in van Leeuwen’s representation of social actors – passivisation, nomination, association, disassociation, exclusion, aggregation, functionalisation, differentiation, indetermination, collectivisation – were indexed in the representational strategies. These representations were also explicated by four processes which include material, verbal, relational and behavioural. The pro-Biafra protesters were equally represented as violent and unruly whereas the protesters construe themselves as law-abiding citizens and freedom fighters as against being treated as terrorists.

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“我们不是恐怖分子，我们是自由战士”：尼日利亚部分报纸对亲比夫拉抗议活动的话语表述

最近尼日利亚各地的亲比夫拉抗议活动已成为新闻媒体的一个重要话题，它以不同的方式构建。现有的关于抗议媒体建构的研究已经考察了框架、言语行为和修辞策略。然而，2015 年和 2016 年亲比夫拉抗议活动的话语表述并未得到足够的关注。因此，本研究考察了关于 2015 年和 2016 年比夫拉抗议的新闻报道的话语策略和意识形态倾向。Van Leeuwen 对社会行为者的表征和 Halliday 的系统功能语言学 (SFL) 作为研究的理论基础。数据是有目的地从四家广泛阅读和流通的尼日利亚报纸中提取的，分别是《冲床》、《太阳报》、Vanguard 和 The Nation 为抗议活动的报道分配了足够的空间。所涵盖的时期是 2015 年至 2016 年，这是该国抗议活动最激烈的时期。研究发现了三种代表性策略，包括“抗议者作为自由斗士”、“抗议者作为经济破坏者”和“抗议者作为守法公民”。van Leeuwen 的社会行动者表征中的十种策略——被动化、提名、关联、分离、排斥、聚集、功能化、分化、不确定性、集体化——被索引在表征策略中。这些表征还可以通过物质、语言、关系和行为四个过程来解释。