Restorative Justice and Community Healing in Post-Insurgency Northern Nigeria: A Theoretical Development

This study develops original theoretical contributions to the application of restorative justice in the post-insurgency healing context of northern Nigeria, covering the North East and North West geopolitical zones. While restorative justice principles have been extensively theorised in criminal justice and post-conflict peacebuilding literature, their application in contexts of mass atrocity, insurgency, and community-level transitional justice in Muslim-majority northern Nigerian communities presents unique theoretical challenges that existing frameworks inadequately address. Employing a constructivist grounded theory methodology, the study generated theoretical propositions from 70 in-depth interviews and 12 community dialogue sessions involving conflict survivors, religious scholars, traditional justice practitioners, and restorative justice facilitators in Borno, Yobe, Zamfara, and Sokoto states. Supplementary analysis of Islamic jurisprudence sources on forgiveness and restorative accountability provided theoretical triangulation. The theoretical contribution is an original Northern Nigeria Restorative Justice in Conflict Model that integrates Islamic jurisprudential principles of hudud, qisas, and sulh with restorative justice theory, generating a contextualised framework that builds on indigenous religious and cultural resources rather than imposing external justice frameworks. Findings indicate that community healing processes incorporating Islamic restorative principles alongside secular restorative justice mechanisms achieve significantly higher community acceptance and participation rates than secular-only approaches. Recommendations include training northern Nigerian peacebuilding practitioners in the proposed integrated restorative justice model, engaging Islamic scholars as restorative justice co-facilitators, and piloting the framework in selected post-insurgency communities as a precursor to scaling. Keywords: restorative justice, community healing, northern Nigeria, post-insurgency, Islamic jurisprudence.