Analysing media framing of the farmer–herder conflict in Nigeria: Combining topic modelling and Qualitative Content Analysis

Since 1999, the farmer–herder conflict in Nigeria has intensified and spread, driven by a complex set of social, political and environmental factors, including climate change. This study uses topic modelling and Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) to analyse newspaper coverage of the conflict between 2017 and 2021 across four national newspapers, encompassing a geographically, ethnically and religiously diverse corpus. Whilst the topic models provide a macro-level overview of the farmer–herder conflict’s coverage across outlets, the qualitative analysis examines the representation of the conflict’s causes, consequences and solutions in greater depth, revealing a lack of clear-cut patterns between newspapers. Findings demonstrate that representations of the conflict’s consequences and solutions were diverse, with newspapers from the South generally focusing more upon an ethnic framing of the conflict’s causes, whereas newspapers in the North emphasized climate change as a key driver. Overall, the authors’ findings complicate previous understandings of media coverage of the conflict, revealing a diverse set of media frames.