Description
This paper critically engages African decolonial feminist conceptions of justice in Sub-Saharan Africa. While decolonial and Afro-feminist scholars critique the dual influences of coloniality and patriarchy on justice processes, their turn to African philosophies such as Ubuntu and frameworks of legal pluralism often romanticizes justice for African women as performative or abstract. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Lake Chad Basin (October 2022–June 2023), this paper advances a grounded account of decolonial feminist justice through the lived experiences, expectations, and cosmologies of women returnees and survivors of the Boko Haram crisis within transitional justice processes. It examines (1) how colonial legacies embedded in transitional justice frameworks erase women’s experiences and agency; (2) how decolonial interpretations of justice may inadvertently reproduce the epistemic erasures they seek to overcome; and (3) how women’s embodied realities articulate justice as tangible rather than abstract. The findings underscore that for women survivors of armed conflict; justice is not an idealized construct but a lived and material pursuit.
Keywords: justice, women, transitional justice, Boko Haram, Northeast Nigeria, Afrofeminism
