"We Are All Infidels": Discursive De-Othering And The Politics Of Religious Identity In Nigeria

Religious identity remains a significant resource for political differentiation in Nigeria, where constructions of belonging can reinforce social boundaries and polarisation. This study examines how the category infidel functions as religious othering and how its contestation reconfigures identity and belonging in Nigerian political discourse. Guided mainly by van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study adopts a qualitative design and purposively selected 149 publicly available data items collected in August 2026, comprising four news reports, one social-media post, four institutional responses, 60 Nairaland comments and 80 Facebook comments. The analysis traced three interconnected processes: religious othering, discursive de-othering, and identity/belonging reconfiguration. Findings show that infidel initially constructed a religious Other that established a hierarchy of membership categories, but its meaning and referential scope were subsequently contested through recontextualisation, semantic shift, perspectivisation, evaluative transformation and reappropriation. The analysis further demonstrates that de-othering does not simply reverse othering; rather, it may weaken, redistribute or reorganise existing boundaries of difference and belonging. The study proposes the De-Othering Model (DoM) to explain how othering categories are contested and transformed, extending CDA from the construction of the Other to the negotiation of otherness and membership in a Global-South plural political context.