GENDER MAINSTREAMING AND PEACEBUILDING IN THE NIGER DELTA: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE 2009 AMNESTY PROGRAMME THROUGH THE LENS OF THE WARRI CRISIS

Utilising the Warri crisis of 1997–2003 and its aftermath as the main empirical case study, this dissertation critically investigates the degree to which gender was mainstreamed in the PAP. The degree of gender mainstreaming in the PAP, the roles women played in the Warri crisis and their acknowledgement in official peace processes, and the structural obstacles that hindered gender mainstreaming, as well as the lessons for future peace agreements in the Niger Delta, were the three research questions. Three theoretical frameworks are integrated in the dissertation: inter-sectionality, critical peace-building theory, and feminist political ecology. This qualitative single embedded case study design uses feminist content analysis of PAP policy documents, media and archival iv v sources, secondary empirical literature, and semi-structured interviews with women impacted by conflict, civil society actors, and institutional informants in Delta State. The results show that the PAP failed to mainstream gender at every level of its architecture: its monitoring framework generated no gender-disaggregated data; its weapon-surrender eligibility criterion structurally excluded the majority of women involved in conflict; and its reintegration streams reproduced gender divisions of labour. By expanding the gender paradox of the local turn to a West African resource-conflict environment and showcasing the analytical productivity of fusing feminist political ecology with critical peace studies in post- conflict DDR research, the thesis advances feminist peace-building theory.