LAUSR

ABSTRACT The political conflicts facing the world are like well-synchronised pyrotechnic display responding to the sound effect of the film Jaws. It produces complex narratives which are underscored by looming political instability. The danger is heightened by the fact that nobody knows where the shark will surface from or who will be the next victim. These dangers have become synonymous with what Fiske would regard as hegemonic struggles against a multitude of resistances to ideological domination. The paper uses Gramsci’s hegemony to interrogate the resistance and terror activities of the Islamic fundamentalist group, Boko Haram and how Nigerian political environment has enabled it to become a powerful resistant movement. It examines the role news media play in the whole theatre of war. The questions the research ask are whether the group uses religion as a subterfuge for political resistance against Nigerian hegemonic powers or whether it tries to re-assert a dominant pre-colonial Islamist ideology in Northern Nigeria, or whether this is part of a more complex global resistance movement which uses porous political states as nodes of infiltration. It investigates the complex position media occupies from within and outside the epicentres of these conflicts and interrogates its surveillance roles in the conflicts.