Nigeria’s international reputation can disadvantage entrepreneurs through a “liability of origin.” Interviews with 12 nation-branding practitioners and policymakers show that trust cannot be repaired quickly through slogans. Credible nation branding requires managing tensions between promises and delivery, and between demands for rapid reputational improvement and the slow pace of institutional reform.

This dissertation examines whether describing crowd disasters as “stampedes” affects how people assign blame. The talk argues that the term wrongly implies irrational, selfish victim behaviour, obscuring structural failures in planning and crowd management. Experiments will test whether language shifts blame from systems to victims in perceptions of crowd crushes.