Fifth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Sovereignty in the Age of Cybercrime – A Cultural Realist Reading of To Kill a Monkey

[Christiana Essie Sagay is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa, Canada]

I take God, beg you, cut soap for me. Show me the way. Abeg!

Anchoring Kemi Adetiba’s 2025 Netflix crime thriller in its entirety, this colloquial Nigerian phrase signals an impassioned plea to learn the means and methods of success, and, more than that, an invitation to extend the hand of friendship.

It is a request to be brought into the fold.

This is where the story begins to unfold, and what follows is a test of the ties that bind.

Often dismissed as romanticizing deviance or ignoring policy development, cultural realism meets its match in Kemi Adetiba’s To Kill a Monkey, which places cybercrime and its legal and moral stakes front and center, foregrounding how law is lived, translated, and contested across cultural and institutional terrains. Set in Lagos, Nigeria, this crime thriller foregrounds the micro-practices through which law is made and unmade in everyday life through street-level negotiations, bureaucratic improvisations, and the moral vocabularies with which cyber-crimes are told.

Lagos, here, is the site where rules acquire meaning through people, place, and pressure. Those pressures are palpable from episode one, especially in conversations about familial obligation. Efe’s exchanges with his natal kin and with his partner provide the moral and emotional scaffolding for his choice to join Oboz’s syndicate which includes cybercrime. Crucially, the series refuses the easy moral. It neither glamorizes nor flattens the underworld it portrays. The characters’ choices are legible within local understandings of shame and success, inside economies of care and obligation, and against a backdrop of structural scarcity. Rather than cast the syndicate as cardboard villains, To Kill a Monkey, situates them within the postcolonial inheritances that structure life chances: stark inequality, youth disillusionment, and the lingering memory of extraction. 

The choices made by the syndicate, immediately reorients the narrative, because cybercrime by its very nature transcends geographical boundaries. The activity of this syndicate drags the story, and the law, beyond Lagos’s boundaries into a web of transnational and international jurisdictions with the legal entanglements that follow. 

The syndicate’s choices immediately reorient the narrative: by definition, cybercrime spills across borders. Their operations drag both story and law beyond Lagos into a thicket of transnational and international jurisdictions, and the legal entanglements that follow. The series, in turn, bridges two interpretive traditions for reading cybercrime. One treats crime, harm, and state power as materially consequential and policy relevant. The other foregrounds meaning, narrative, and lived experience as the ways offenses and their consequences are interpreted, resisted, or enacted. These interpretative traditions surface in how characters relate to law as something selectively respected, tactically avoided, or morally debated. For Oboz and Efe, legal codes coexist with an informal order of brotherhood, reputation, reciprocity, and social responsibility; cybercrime becomes a way to meet obligations and assert agency within their economy.

Because the syndicate operates transnationally, these tensions intensify, dramatizing the overlap of cybercrime, power, and state authority within a context that both resists and enacts international norms. While the nation-state gropes for leverage through cross-border cooperation, the gang crystallizes its own power through its activities with the monkey icon as seal. The icon does several things – first it taunts law enforcement and unifies the group in anonymity and dominance, also it deliberately reappropriates a racist figure, turned inside-out to signify competence, cunning, and survival, renarrating its activities as strategy and ambition, and suturing a postcolonial present to a precolonial past. The icon thus functions as a rallying device for outlaw ideology and a metacommentary on global perception. It exposes the aesthetics of criminalization while making legible the agency, however misdirected, of those consigned to its margins. Their high-tech crimes read as insurrectionary theatre. A cultural-realist lens does not excuse wrongdoing; it insists that legal behaviour is produced within vernacularized practices, translating global norms, such that they are historically situated repertoires, street vocabularies, kinship duties, and popular idioms with local meanings that can authorize, dilute, or redirect them. This account of translation echoes insights from international relations and legal sociology, particularly norm diffusion theory, which has argued that the success of international norms often depends less on their formal adoption than on how they are localized, interpreted, and enacted within specific cultural and institutional settings. To Kill a Monkey visualizes this interpretive labour, how legal norms are not merely implemented, but made meaningful through local vocabularies of shame, survival, and legitimacy.

Reading the series through the lens of international law sharpens, rather than blunts, its core insight, that legality is always mediated by context. Instruments like the UN Convention against Cybercrime, and the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime codify global norms around jurisdiction, due diligence, and sovereignty in cyberspace. But To Kill a Monkey reminds us that law does not travel frictionlessly. While critiques of international legal frameworks often focus on weak institutional capacity or the persistence of neo-colonial legal hierarchies, a cultural realist lens locates the tension elsewhere: in meaning. It asks not only whether states can implement international norms, but whether those norms resonate with the moral vocabularies, historical memories, and lived legal orders already at play. This distinction matters, because failures of implementation may reflect not merely technical gaps but deeper interpretive dissonance. From a cultural realist perspective, the test of such frameworks lies not in doctrinal coherence but in their traction, how they interact with the institutional textures and moral logics of the societies tasked with enforcing them. In principle, mutual assistance regimes and sovereignty rules promise legal clarity; in practice, their efficacy depends in addition to political will, institutional trust, depend on cultural resonance. Even committed actors like Inspector Mo operate within systems constrained by bureaucratic inertia, corruption, and limited capacity.

In this light, To Kill a Monkey offers a textured portrait of law’s uneven life on the ground. Sovereignty emerges here as a performative and contested practice, shaped as much by legitimacy of actors, and lived experience as by formal rule. Taken together, these dynamics offer not just a portrait of fragmented authority, but a provocation, what does it mean to think sovereignty in this contested space?

What, then, of sovereignty? The series asks us to move beyond the reflex that equates sovereignty with territorial control. Instead, sovereignty appears as an arrangement of power negotiated between state and citizen and refracted through everyday life. In the digital age, that arrangement is unsettled by two forces at once: the pervasively disruptive reach of digital technologies and global threats such as cybercrime. The result is a contest between the sovereignty we are drifting into, shaped by platforms, data flows, and cross-border activities, and Westphalia notion of  sovereignty with a unitary state monopoly on power. The show presents sovereignty as fractured, negotiated, and often fragile. These tensions do not undermine the international frameworks addressing cybercrime rather, they illuminate the need to understand global norms not as plug-and-play solutions, but as legal vernaculars that gain force only when meaningfully situated. Reading the show this way highlights how technology and society continually remake one another, and how sovereignty is made in that interplay.

By the final episode, To Kill a Monkey has not solved the problem it dramatizes, and that is precisely the point. The series leaves us in the friction zone where sovereignty is less a fortress than a negotiated practice under technological strain. The future of sovereignty, then, is not only a legal question but a political and cultural one: which forms of state power remain thinkable and desirable in a digital world, and on whose terms?

To Kill a Monkey does not answer that question for us. 

Instead, by staying with the local drama and the protagonist’s hubris, the series refuses easy glamorization and resists neat resolutions. 

The uncertainty it preserves is the argument.