Abstract
In Africa’s history of peace, conflict, and security, one of the most challenging dynamics is the evolution of violent extremism. Despite the magnitude of this problem, most of the programmes for mitigation still over-rely on Western donor support as opposed to national financing by the affected African states. Many interventions are therefore designed based on Western epistemology. The programme design, consequently, confounds the exclusion of subaltern voices, which also affect available space for indigenous African women in the initiatives for tackling violent extremism. The study, therefore, seeks to examine the dynamics of exclusion based on the provisions of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security. Phenomenology was used to design this qualitative research, based on Constructivist Grounded Theory (CTG). This design takes a constructivist approach that moves beyond the basic problem-solving methods. Primary data was collected through interviews with 22 participants, purposively sampled among programme staff of state and non-state agencies. Secondary data was captured by document review to complement the interviews. Analysis was guided by Conflict Transformation Theory in concurrence with Afrocentric reflections.
Consequently, empirical findings demonstrate that most interventions for countering violent extremism are technically limited by conceptualisations and constructions about terrorism and violent extremism, intrigued by the knowledge systems of the foreign supporting agencies. These dynamics do not only manipulate the local understanding of violent extremism but are also likely to suppress the local voices and subaltern knowledge structures. Interviews, for instance, demonstrate how indigenous practitioners and local beneficiaries struggle to be relevant and to ‘fit in’ to the ‘international domain’. Given the underlying contextual circumstances, African women, unfortunately, find themselves isolated in the subjugated space of the informal interventions. Incidentally, it is within the ‘informality’ where indigenous knowledge is produced, shared, and actualised, hence, crowding out indigenous knowledge as being informal substantially obscures the desired space for African women to take an active role in tackling violent extremism.
Despite the underlying systemic issues, findings provide evidence that sustainable inclusion of women is a possibility without creating some polarising binary of male against female actors. Indigenous intervention frameworks, for instance, creates agency exercised by women and enhance opportunities for increasing the visibility of women in the interventions. The enhanced agency is thus drawn from an empowerment approach based on an Afrocentric model of Transformative Agency. The Africanness of the framework is devised in the three Firestone model, called Hamasisha, which espouses local positionality in the knowledge production process to contest the [mis]representation of African women as victims, jihadi brides or mothers. Instead, the Hamasisha model recognises [African] indigenous women as substantive knowledge producers in tackling violent extremism, portraying that the universal or ‘global knowledge’ in CVE can preclude gender inclusion.