Decolonising Peacebuilding Practice in Africa: Nigerian Evidence and Theoretical Contributions

This study makes an original contribution to the global project of decolonising peacebuilding theory and practice by generating systematic evidence from the Nigerian context, drawing on cases from all six geopolitical zones. The dominant theoretical frameworks and operational models in international peacebuilding retain significant colonial legacies that privilege Western liberal peace assumptions, marginalise African epistemologies, and produce intervention designs misaligned with the relational, spiritual, and collective dimensions of peace understood in African communities. Employing a decolonial methodology combining participatory action research, community narrative workshops, and critical discourse analysis, the study generated data from 18 months of fieldwork involving 120 community peace practitioners, traditional authorities, women peace leaders, and conflict scholars across six research sites selected to represent Nigeria's geopolitical diversity. The theoretical contribution is an original African Relational Peacebuilding Theory, which grounds peacebuilding practice in ubuntu philosophy, Igbo communalism, Yoruba restorative principles, and northern Nigerian Islamic peacebuilding ethics, challenging key liberal peace theory assumptions about individuality, state primacy, and sequenced peace-development relationships. Findings demonstrate that community-led peacebuilding processes guided by indigenous epistemological frameworks achieve superior legitimacy, participation, and durability outcomes compared to externally designed liberal peace interventions in the Nigerian case studies. Recommendations include reforming international peacebuilding programme design processes to centre community epistemologies, developing Nigeria-specific peacebuilding training curricula that integrate indigenous frameworks, and building South-South peacebuilding knowledge exchange networks to share African theoretical innovations. Keywords: decolonising peacebuilding, African epistemology, Nigeria, ubuntu, liberal peace critique.