Human Rights in Nigeria’s External Relations: Building the Record of a Moral Superpower by Philip C Aka (review)

There are four pillars to this temple: redesigning peace-keeping projects, making alterations to Nigeria’s foreign policy, increasing bilateral relationships abroad, and shaping the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) into a tool of human rights diplomacy. By making human rights an important part of the discourse and goals set forth by the government, Nigeria can establish a greater sense of national unity, focusing on, as Aka claims, making human rights something that Nigerian citizens are “interested in” so that they will accept it as part of their foreign and domestic policy. Besides this focus on peacekeeping, Aka argues that ECOWAS can be used, as it increasingly has been, to further promote human rights internationally and reinforce those same rights domestically in Nigeria.