Women’s Peacebuilding Initiatives in the Benue Valley, Nigeria

The difficulty in implementing UNSCR 1325 and the refusal of men in the Benue Valley, Nigeria (BVN) to discuss peace in the formal space with women motivated this book. It examines the systematic way women use their socialised skills to perform important peacebuilding initiatives and it offers analysis of the systematic and structural problems of post-colonial patrarichal gender order which makes it socially acceptable to exclude women's initiatives in formal spaces and by extension from formal conflict resolution processes in the BVN. The book uses the human needs and some gender socialisation theories to conceptualise women's work in the BVN. Topics: Conflict analysis, the root causes of protracted social conflict; sources of women's skills in conflict resolution; women's vision in relation to the satisfaction of human needs; women's initiatives in conflict resolution; and pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial gender order in the BVN. This book is intended for scholars and students, as well as practitioners, of conflict resolution and gender studies; it may prove methodologically useful to Master's students wishing to go on to do a PhD.