Reinterpreting Donald Trump’s Designation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern By Idris Olugbesan, PhD

By Idris Olugbesan PhD Introduction: Religious Freedom and the Political Economy of Moral Power This article interrogates the designation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) by the administration of President Donald Trump as a critical node in the moral economy of U.S. foreign policy and […]

By Idris Olugbesan PhD

Introduction: Religious Freedom and the Political Economy of Moral Power

This article interrogates the designation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) by the administration of President Donald Trump as a critical node in the moral economy of U.S. foreign policy and its evolving modalities of global dominance. While formally justified as an act of humanitarian concern responding to the persecution of religious minorities—especially Christians in Nigeria’s Northern and Middle Belt regions—the designation must be understood as a symptomatic expression of a deeper restructuring of imperial power in an age of post-hegemonic uncertainty.

By situating the CPC designation within the longue durée of capitalist expansion, this study advances a theoretical interpretation grounded in Marxist dependency theory, Foucauldian governmentality, and evangelical political sociology. Together, these frameworks elucidate the moralization of hegemony in the late-capitalist world order. From the standpoint of dependency analysis, “religious freedom” emerges as an ideological instrument through which global capitalism reconstitutes core–periphery relations under a humanitarian veneer. From the analytics of governmentality, it appears as a moral technology of power that governs populations, legitimates intervention, and produces regimes of subjectivity congruent with neoliberal rationalities. Meanwhile, evangelical political sociology illuminates the convergence of spiritual narratives, affective economies, and geopolitical strategy in the reterritorialization of American influence.

The argument advanced herein is that Trump’s moral diplomacy functioned as a compensatory mechanism of symbolic power—a reassertion of normative sovereignty at a historical moment when U.S. material leverage was waning. Following Samir Amin’s (1988) insight that Eurocentric modernity reproduces itself through civilizational discourse, the CPC label can be read as a moral articulation of geopolitical anxiety: a performative act of virtue that simultaneously reinscribes dependency and reclaims ideological ascendancy. In this sense, “religious freedom” operates as a form of neoliberal moral governmentality, suturing together the political economy of belief, the accumulation of moral capital, and the projection of imperial care.

By folding moral discourse into the calculus of statecraft, the Trump administration reproduced what Claude Ake (1981) once termed “ideological domination in the idiom of universalism.” This study thus approaches the CPC designation not as a discrete policy episode but as a discursive and material configuration within the broader architecture of global capitalist reproduction. The analysis proceeds by excavating the geoeconomic, ideological, and domestic political conditions that rendered “religious freedom” a viable instrument of imperial moral economy, while also situating Nigeria’s contemporary security recalibration under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu within the dialectic of sovereignty and dependency that structures the postcolonial condition.

2. The Geoeconomic Context: Nigeria, Energy Capitalism, and Post-Hegemonic Realignment

Nigeria occupies a structurally ambivalent position within the global division of labor: simultaneously a resource frontier and a demographic fulcrum of Africa’s developmental imaginary. The materiality of its postcolonial economy—rooted in petro-capitalism and extractive dependency—has rendered it vulnerable to shifts in global energy regimes. The dramatic decline in U.S. demand for Nigerian crude oil following the shale revolution eroded the material foundation of Washington’s traditional leverage. As emergent powers such as China, India, and the Gulf States expanded infrastructural and financial entanglements with Abuja, the geopolitical center of gravity within Africa’s political economy began to tilt away from transatlantic dominance.

It is precisely within this moment of attenuation that the CPC designation can be read as a discursive reterritorialization of hegemony. Devoid of substantive economic instruments, the United States reasserted its authority through moral capital, repositioning itself as the arbiter of virtue in a rapidly pluralizing world order. The moralization of foreign policy thus compensated for the erosion of economic asymmetry. This dynamic resonates with Walter Rodney’s (1972) thesis that postcolonial dependency is sustained not only by material extraction but also by the continuous production of ideological subordination. Religious freedom, in this context, functioned as the latest iteration of what Amin (2004) terms collective imperialism—the coordination of Western states through normative regimes that legitimize their tutelary role in the governance of the global periphery.

3. Evangelical Moral Economy and the Trumpist Reconfiguration of Power

At the ideological core of the Trump administration’s international moral discourse lay a distinctly evangelical political economy. The institutionalization of “religious freedom” diplomacy under the stewardship of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador-at-Large Sam Brownback represented the fusion of American evangelicalism’s spiritual geography with the material logic of empire. Evangelical networks, spanning megachurches, non-governmental organizations, and transnational missionary circuits, constituted not merely religious communities but also affective infrastructures through which moral legitimacy and political capital were circulated.

The global Christian imaginary mobilized by the Trump administration was anchored in the semiotics of persecution and redemption—a dramaturgy that simultaneously sacralized U.S. power and sanctified its interventions. Nigeria, as both an archetype of African promise and a theatre of Christian suffering, became a symbolic territory within this evangelical cartography. The CPC designation thus performed a dual function: domestically, it resonated with evangelical constituencies central to Trump’s electoral coalition; internationally, it reaffirmed the United States’ self-construction as the custodian of religious virtue and civilizational order.

This convergence of evangelicalism and statecraft demonstrates the transformation of belief into a modality of governance. The moral economies of faith and humanitarianism are folded into the apparatus of global power, producing what Nabudere (2006) identifies as epistemic dependency: the subjection of knowledge, morality, and salvation to the interpretive authority of the global North.

4. The Political Economy of Religious Conflict in Nigeria

Within Nigeria, religious conflict is neither an atavistic eruption of intolerance nor a purely spiritual crisis; it is the ideological surface of deeper structural contradictions. Land scarcity, ecological collapse in the Sahel, endemic unemployment, and uneven regional development form the material substrate upon which sectarian identities acquire political salience. As Okwudiba Nnoli (1978) argued, ethnicity and religion function as idioms through which class and distributive conflicts are articulated.

The CPC designation, by recoding these structural antagonisms into a moral register, performs a dual depoliticization: it transforms economic precarity into spiritual pathology and relocates the locus of causality from global capitalism to indigenous intolerance. This external moralization of Nigeria’s crisis obscures the historical role of colonial capitalism and neoliberal adjustment in producing the very conditions of social disintegration that underlie communal violence.

Moreover, the designation’s circulation within Nigeria’s domestic elite sphere demonstrates the complex feedback loops between global moral hierarchies and local political economies. Nigerian elites, dependent on international legitimacy and capital inflows, often instrumentalize external discourses of morality to consolidate domestic authority. Thus, religious freedom diplomacy functions simultaneously as a disciplinary apparatus and a resource of symbolic capital—disciplining through classification while enabling negotiation within the global moral economy.

5. Reconstituting Security and Sovereignty under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu

In the wake of the CPC episode, Nigeria’s evolving security architecture under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu signals an emergent rearticulation of sovereignty. Tinubu’s early administration has undertaken significant institutional realignments aimed at integrating counterterrorism strategy with developmental imperatives, regional coordination, and local peacebuilding. Such recalibration signifies an implicit rejection of the externally imposed moral hierarchies that have long defined Nigeria’s engagement with Western powers.

Tinubu’s security doctrine, informed by a discourse of national cohesion and people-centered development, seeks to reclaim what Yash Tandon (2015) has termed “policy space”—the capacity of postcolonial states to define their trajectories outside the conditionalities of neoliberal orthodoxy. By repositioning security within the matrix of social justice and economic empowerment, the administration articulates an endogenous paradigm of stability that contests the reduction of Nigeria’s crisis to a religious binary.

In the spirit of Claude Ake’s (1996) later writings, this developmental conception of security represents both a political and epistemic delinking—a refusal of the moral tutelage embedded in Western humanitarianism and an attempt to reconstruct sovereignty as an emancipatory project grounded in the social reproduction of the Nigerian populace.

 

6. Religious Freedom and the Neoliberal Rationality of Empire

Religious freedom, in its contemporary deployment, epitomizes the neoliberal rationalization of empire. As a moral instrument of governance, it extends the reach of capitalist hegemony through the production of virtue and the management of belief. The CPC system functions as a cartography of moral surveillance, codifying global hierarchies of civility while disguising the underlying relations of dependency that sustain them.

This moralization of global order reflects the transformation of power in late capitalism—from direct economic domination to the regulation of subjectivities through ethical discourse. In this sense, religious freedom is less a universal principle than a governmental rationality that organizes populations, disciplines states, and legitimizes intervention. The sacred, once a domain of transcendence, is thus subsumed into the apparatus of neoliberal governance, generating what Amin (2004) identifies as collective imperialism: the synchronization of moral, economic, and epistemic domination in the reproduction of global capitalism.

7. Conclusion: Sovereignty Beyond Moral Imperialism

The designation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern under Donald Trump stands as an emblematic instance of the moralization of hegemony in the twenty-first century. What appeared as humanitarian solicitude was, in effect, a reconfiguration of imperial power through the grammar of virtue. When read through the composite theoretical lens of Marxist dependency theory, Foucauldian governmentality, and evangelical political sociology, the CPC episode reveals the complex assemblage through which neoliberal empire sustains itself: the economic reproduction of dependency, the governmental management of belief, and the evangelical dramatization of global order.

Yet within this matrix of subjection, the Tinubu administration’s efforts to reconstitute security as development and sovereignty as social justice suggest an embryonic form of resistance—a tentative delinking from the moral economies of the West. The Nigerian case thereby foregrounds the broader struggle for epistemic and developmental autonomy in the Global South: the quest to transcend the humanitarian veneer of neoliberal governance and to reconstruct sovereignty upon indigenous foundations of peace, justice, and collective self-reliance.

8. Policy Recommendations: Reclaiming Security through Structural Transformation

To transcend the recursive cycles of insurgency, terrorism, and social unrest, Nigeria must reimagine security not as a technocratic or militarized domain but as a structural question of political economy and epistemic sovereignty. The persistence of violent extremism derives less from ideological zealotry than from the historical sedimentations of dependency, dispossession, and developmental exclusion that structure Nigeria’s incorporation into the neoliberal world order. Addressing these crises, therefore, requires a paradigmatic delinking from externally imposed security orthodoxies and the construction of an endogenous architecture of peace, development, and justice.

First, security must be reframed as developmental justice. The material infrastructure of insurgency is rooted in the uneven spatial distribution of resources and opportunities. Counterterrorism must thus operate as a redistributive and reconstructive project that integrates economic empowerment with human security. This entails coordinated planning across the ministries of Defence, Agriculture, Youth, and Humanitarian Affairs, aimed at transforming peripheral zones—particularly the Northeast and Middle Belt—into sites of productive inclusion. A “peace dividend” strategy, coupling livelihood creation with infrastructural rehabilitation and land reform, would translate pacification into tangible social transformation, dislodging the political economy of violence.

Second, Nigeria must decolonize the epistemology and practice of security. The importation of Western counterinsurgency paradigms perpetuates epistemic dependency and strategic misrecognition. Security doctrine should instead emerge from the historical, cultural, and ecological realities of the Nigerian polity. Institutionalizing indigenous peace infrastructures—traditional councils, community vigilante networks, and faith-based mediators—within the national security framework would pluralize authority and restore legitimacy. Simultaneously, Nigerian research institutions must generate autonomous knowledge regimes capable of theorizing conflict beyond the discursive confines of counterterrorism as humanitarian tutelage.

Third, a human-centered security paradigm must replace the punitive logic of state coercion. Counterinsurgency should prioritize reconciliation, reintegration, and the restoration of civic trust. Reforming the security sector through transparency, accountability, and community oversight is essential to reconstitute the moral legitimacy of the state. Deradicalization programs should evolve into comprehensive social reintegration schemes encompassing vocational training, psychosocial healing, and restorative justice. Women and youth, as epistemic agents of peace rather than passive subjects of rescue, must occupy central positions in the design and implementation of security policies.

Fourth, insurgency’s transnational character necessitates regionalized sovereignty. Strengthening the Multinational Joint Task Force and ECOWAS coordination mechanisms would facilitate cross-border intelligence and stabilize the Sahelian frontier. Yet such engagement must be predicated on reciprocal partnership, not dependency; Nigeria’s diplomacy should resist the moral asymmetry embedded in Western securitization discourses that conflate aid with tutelage.

Finally, democratic deepening remains the ultimate guarantor of security. Governance legitimacy, anti-corruption, fiscal decentralization, and participatory citizenship are the political preconditions for social peace. Only by transforming the state from an extractive apparatus into a developmental commons can Nigeria dissolve the structural violence that underwrites insurgency.

In sum, reclaiming security requires the political economy of emancipation: a sovereign praxis that fuses economic redistribution, epistemic autonomy, and moral independence. Security, thus reconceived, becomes not an appendage of empire but a project of collective self-reliance—the reconstitution of peace as both material justice and ontological freedom.