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Contribution short abstract

This paper analyses youth‑led narrative journalism and poetry from Nigeria’s EndSARS movement as extra‑institutional development practice, examining how cultural writing functions as grassroots agency to document violence, contest dominant narratives and articulate alternative civic futures.

Contribution long abstract

This paper examines youth‑led cultural writing as a form of grassroots agency in development contexts marked by state violence and institutional failure. Focusing on Nigeria’s 2020 EndSARS movement, it analyses how narrative journalism and poetry function as extra‑institutional development practice through which communities document harm, contest dominant paradigms and articulate alternative futures.

The paper draws on a qualitative case study of two interconnected sites of cultural production: The Republic, a literary‑cultural magazine that documented the EndSARS protests and the Lekki Toll Gate killings, and Sọ̀rọ̀sókè: An #EndSARS Anthology, a poetry collection produced in response to the same events. Using documentary analysis of published texts alongside semi‑structured interviews with editors and writers, the study examines writing as a form of collective knowledge production embedded within social movement mobilisation.

The analysis identifies three ways in which writing operates as development agency beyond formal institutions. First, narrative essays and poems create civilian‑led archives that resist erasure and assert claims to accountability. Second, they enable civic dialogue by situating episodes of violence within longer histories of repression and exclusion, challenging development narratives centred on stability and growth. Third, as youth‑produced cultural forms, they shape how political violence is remembered and transmitted across generations, contributing to future‑oriented civic imaginaries grounded in dignity and justice.

By positioning cultural writing as an agent of development rather than a representational by‑product, the paper aligns with calls to reimagine development from the ground up and to recognise alternative knowledge systems produced by movements navigating uncertainty and repression.