Power Through Absence: Everyday Resistance, Political Agency, and the Indigenous People of Biafra’s Monday Sit-at-Home Protest in Nigeria

The Monday sit-at-home protest initiated by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in Southeastern Nigeria has often been framed as economically disruptive, socially inconvenient, or symptomatic of leadership deficits. While these interpretations dominate the literature, they overlook the strategic, symbolic, and politically agentive dimensions of the practice. This paper re-conceptualizes the IPOB’s Monday sit-at-home protest as a form of everyday nonviolent resistance. The paper adopts James C. Scott’s “Everyday Resistance” as its theoretical framework to analyze absence, silence, and withdrawal as deliberate modes of political engagement. The paper employs interpretivist paradigm grounded in historical realism to analyze IPOB’s communiqués, media reports, textbooks, and internet materials in order to uncover the socio-political and historical significance of the Monday sit-at-home protest. The analysis situates the practice within the legacies of postcolonial, post-civil war marginalization, ethno-nationalist mobilization, and state-citizen contestation in Southeastern Nigeria. It shows how IPOB through the Monday sit-at-home protest strategically navigate constrained political spaces. By foregrounding the meanings attached by IPOB to absence and non-participation, the paper illuminates how everyday acts of withdrawal function as both symbolic and practical tools of political influence. The paper contributes to scholarship on everyday resistance, political agency, and nonviolent mobilization by extending Scott’s concepts to the African (Nigeria) context. It challenges conventional narratives that depict IPOB’s sit-at-home protest primarily as socio-economic disruption by demonstrating instead its capacity to assert agency, negotiate power, and communicate dissent without open confrontation. By studying IPOB’s Monday sit-at-home, we can learn how communities with little formal power can still influence politics through quiet, nonviolent acts, especially in places where open protest is risky. These lessons are useful for understanding similar forms of resistance around the world. By combining interpretivist and historically grounded approaches, this work positions the IPOB’s Monday sit-at-home protest not merely as a regional phenomenon, but as a conceptually rich case of everyday resistance with implications for the study of nonviolent political action worldwide. Keywords: Resistance, Absence, Power, Political Agency, IPOB, Nigeria, Sit-at-home, Protest.