Engendering Religious Extremism and Violence: Nigerian Women and the Pursuit of Non-Violence

Nigeria has endured the explosion of such religious extremism and violence, eliciting mass civil unrest particularly in the last two decades. Women are often especially at the risk of victimization, enduring diverse forms of human rights violations though their participation and instrumentalization in orchestrating such acts of violence complexifies the relationship between gender and religiously motivated violence in Nigeria. In addition, the exploration of their efforts to form part of the nexus of public discourse critiquing religious extremism and violence in the public sphere within scholarly discourse leaves room for more to be said especially with respect to Nigerian and African women. Through the juxtaposition of two of such women-led efforts, this paper, therefore, seeks to engage contemporary scholarship on the intersection of religion, violence, and gender by examining the resources Nigerian and African women utilize in their mobilizing quest towards demanding accountability and justice for the oppressed. This paper will argue that Nigerian and African women’s pursuit for social justice are often constructed in spaces of duality where their agency is firmly asserted and remains uncontested and the margin between violence and non-violence at blurred.