Theorising Gender and Peacebuilding in the Nigerian Context: Towards a Framework for Feminist Peace

Nigeria's multiple conflict contexts, including the Boko Haram insurgency, farmer-herder conflicts, and Niger Delta unrest, have generated significant peacebuilding programming, yet the gendered dimensions of peace processes and the potential of feminist peace frameworks remain theoretically underdeveloped for the Nigerian context. This study develops a Feminist Peace Framework (FPF) for Nigeria, grounded in empirical analysis of women's peacebuilding experiences across conflict-affected zones and feminist peace and security scholarship. A transformative feminist paradigm underpins a multi-method design employing 70 in-depth interviews with women peacebuilders, security actors, and policy practitioners in Borno, Kaduna, and Plateau States, participatory action research with three women's peacebuilding groups, and analysis of 20 peace agreement documents. Feminist security studies, Ubuntu ethics, and gender and peacebuilding theory guided framework development. Findings reveal that women's contributions to peacebuilding in Nigeria operate primarily through informal channels, including inter-community mediation, market network peace maintenance, and IDP community conflict prevention, that are systematically excluded from formal peace processes. Women's participation in formal peace negotiations averages 8% across the peace processes examined. The resulting FPF integrates formal, informal, and structural peace dimensions, providing a practically actionable model for gender-transformative peacebuilding in Nigeria's diverse conflict contexts. Keywords: feminist peacebuilding, gender, Nigeria, conflict, peace framework