Working from Within:
Nigerian Women and Conflict Resolution
By Gwendolyn Mikell
Most national conflicts have to do with competition for political
space and resources. Recent conflict resolution and political
activism by Nigeria's Muslim women's groups are worthy of
deeper consideration because of the political and policy relevance
for the international community in peace building and
societal reconstruction. While women's groups throughout
Africa are making progress in peace and reconstruction efforts
in places such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, initiatives in
Nigeria are particularly noteworthy. There, Muslim women's
groups mediate the cultural and ideological dynamics of
national conflicts to legitimately reconstruct society. Female
activism has helped bring Nigeria back from the brink of collapse
by building local grass roots movements for democracy,
human rights, and conflict resolution despite a precarious
political environment.
Nigeria provides a significant example because of the leading
role it plays in peacekeeping and conflict resolution in
West Africa, and due to its large Muslim and Christian populations.
Furthermore, Nigeria faces considerable domestic
turmoil given its interpretation of Shari'a law and its history of
militant violence, compounded by tensions over oil ownership.
In Nigeria, Muslim women's groups bridge the Islamic
and non-Islamic discourses on democratic rights and women's rights and achieve compromises that
advance national reconciliation in ways
that parliamentarians and politicians,
both foreign and domestic, cannot. One
of the most pertinent examples of this was
the peaceful resolutions of the Amina
Lawal and Safiya Husseini cases, in which
two Muslim women were sentenced to
death under Shari'a law.
The international community can
learn important lessons from states, such
as Nigeria, that are multi-ethnic, multireligious
states, have avoided collapse, yet
still face tensions that threaten state stability.
To learn from these women's
groups, four assumptions must be challenged.
First, we must confront considerable
Western ignorance about Islamic
cultures and reject anti-democratic,
anti-female stereotypes. Second, we must
abandon the Huntingtonian assumption
that "terrorism" will emanate from all
Muslim areas where anti-Western
rhetoric develops.2 Third, we need to
interrogate the nature of global-local
linkages, since, contrary to Western
expectations, global influences may
intensify the conflicts that these women
seek to resolve, and can elevate the level
of anti-Western and anti-Christian
speech in these areas. Lastly, we need to
contextualize the Nigerian conflict;
women's peace movements are sustained
by an intricate dialogue between cultures
and within a culture, and cannot be fully
understood without discussion of the
circumstances.
This article is premised upon a challenge
to these four assumptions. It examines
Nigerian Muslim women's conflict
resolution initiatives by exploring the
roots and nature of their activism, their
unique perspectives on terror and local
violence, their experiences with globallocal
exchanges, and the intra-Islamic dialogues to which their initiatives
respond.