Interrogating glocalization and Nigeria’s foreign policy in global politics: role conceptions, policy variation, and the glocal imperative

Nigerian foreign policy has oscillated between externally oriented globalism and domestically anchored glocalism since independence in 1960, yet existing scholarship offers little explanatory account of this variation. This article asks why Nigerian foreign policy succeeds or fails in achieving glocalization, and answers by integrating National Role Conception (NRC) theory with glocalization and decolonial critique. Glocalization supplies the standard against which policy is measured; NRC supplies the causal mechanism, showing how elite identity mediates the translation of global pressure and domestic need into policy; decolonial theory explains why that mediation has so often run in the wrong direction. Working from a periodized qualitative analysis of four historical phases (1960–1975; 1975–1999; 1999–2015; 2015–2023) and grounded in primary economic, budgetary, and World Bank documentary sources, the article shows that externally oriented role conceptions produced weak or incoherent glocalization at measurable domestic cost, while domestically anchored conceptions produced stronger, though still partial, alignment. Building on Folorunso et al., the article offers a replicable explanatory model for African states and argues that Nigeria’s glocal deficit is better read as a structural legacy of coloniality than as a failure of individual leadership.