Women’s Experiences with Transitional Justice Processes in the Lake Chad Basin: The Boko Haram Case

This dissertation investigates women’s experiences with transitional justice (TJ) in the Lake Chad Basin (LCB) against the backdrop of the Boko Haram crisis using a decolonial feminist lens. Despite women’s mass and strategic involvement in Boko Haram’s insurgency since 2013, their perspectives remain marginal in the design and implementation of TJ processes. This exclusion reflects both the patriarchal and colonial character of mainstream TJ scholarship, which privileges formal, state-led mechanisms of Eurocentric origin. Where informal processes are acknowledged, they are often framed as less credible alternatives to “mainstream” approaches. Adopting a decolonial feminist and intersectional lens, and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Abuja, Adamawa, and Borno between October 2022 and June 2023, the study centers women’s experiences as a litmus test for justice within transitional justice processes. This dissertation aims to challenge unrepresentative framings of justice and agency in Women, Peace and Security (WPS) literature by foregrounding the lived experiences of women in conflict affected communities. In doing so, the analysis explores how transitional justice processes in the LCB, shaped by colonial legacies and patriarchy, interact to marginalize women. It further explores how women navigate multiple layers of exclusion to assert their agency. Questioning the assumption that women in the Global South lack the capacity for self-determination, especially during conflicts and the ensuing post-conflict period, the dissertation highlights how women define justice for themselves. The dissertation is structured in five substantive parts. First, it situates the research through a critical and decolonial feminist reading of TJ scholarship and a discussion of its theoretical and methodological foundations. Second, it maps ongoing TJ processes in the LCB, highlighting tensions and interactions between external and local TJ initiatives, as well as between formal and informal processes. Third, the dissertation examines women’s experience of those processes, revealing a multi-layered exclusion and a minimization of their agency for violence. Fourth, it demonstrates the ways post-conflict processes fail to acknowledge the irreversible changes in gender roles inspired by the crises. Finally, by presenting women’s articulation of their concept of justice and through its analysis on the sites and modes of agency, the dissertation reconceptualizes justice based on the episteme of women in the LCB. This thesis contributes to debates on justice for women in sub-Saharan Africa by offering a conception that draws on the episteme of women in the LCB and not on jurisprudence. It also enriches decolonial feminist scholarship by offering a grounded account of justice in an African context while resisting romanticization of the local, as is the tendency in decolonial scholarship. It also contributes to Black feminist studies by advancing intersectionality as an analytical tool for capturing not only oppression but also solidarity across shared and differing identities. Through its analysis of sites and modes of agency, it expands understandings of women’s agency under repressive structures. By centering women’s voices, this dissertation demonstrates that the future of transitional justice in Africa must be re-imagined through the lived experiences of those most affected by conflict.