Nigeria's EndSARS Activism and Implicit Collective Memory

This pioneering book delivers a foremost in-depth study of the protest against the Nigerian Police's Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) from the perspective of memory studies. Blending scholarly insight with personal experience, the author, both a researcher and a front-line participant in the protest, offers a rare, insider-informed perspective. The book interrogates how protesters constructed diverse memory practices and mobilized digital platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp to organize, document, and sustain resistance. Moving beyond the immediate trigger of the protest, the book uncovers dire conditions that ignited the protest: youth unemployment, poverty, entrenched public-sector corruption, and perennial police brutality. These interlocking challenges form what the author terms an implicit collective memory, the shared socio-economic trauma that formed the underlying catalyst of the EndSARS movement. Interdisciplinary, urgent, and deeply grounded in the lived realities of the Global Majority, this book offers an essential contribution to the study of activism, digital resistance, and collective memory.

The first academic engagement with Nigeria's EndSARS movement from the perspective of memory studies Provides a new interdisciplinary framework by bringing implicit collective memory into the research of modern activism Amplifies the voices of the Global South, counter to the Western-hegemony over discourses of public memory and activism

Autorentext

Dr. Silas Udenze is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto, Canada. He earned his PhD from Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. His interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary and past socio-political movements in Africa, mainly through theoretical lenses of digital activism and memory. Dr. Udenzes’s work occupies a unique space at the margins of media/communication studies, anthropology, and sociology, incorporating non-media-centric paradigms, particularly cultural and mnemonic dimensions. His works have been published in Media, War and Conflict, Africa Spectrum, and Memory Studies. Dr Silas has presented his works at top conferences such as the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), the Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), and the Memory Studies Association conference.

Inhalt

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2 : Contextualizing Nigeria : Ethnic, Political And Socio-Economic Complexities.- Chapter 3 : From Past to Present: Nigerian Protest Movements and the EndSARS.- Chapter 4 : Rethinking Place In Activism And Visual Culture In The Protest.- Chapter 5 : Digital Activism and Social Movements: Memory as a Connector .- Chapter 6 : From Silence to Visibility: Implicit Collective Memory in the EndSARS Movement.- Chapter 7 : Conclusion: Implications, Contributions and Reflections.