Titilope Ajayi is a PhD Candidate at the Legon Centre for International Affairs and Diplomacy (LECIAD), University of Ghana. A feminist researcher and writer on security and civil society, she has held appointments as head of research at the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI) and fellow/West Africa analyst with the International Crisis Group (ICS). Ajayi founded and coordinates Doing A PhD in Africa (www.doingaphdinafrica.org) and also works as an independent copyeditor. She was a Next Gen Dissertation Proposal Fellow (2017) and an African Peacebuilding Network Individual Grant recipient (2018).
Her latest publications include:
The Postponement of Nigeria’s 2019 Elections: Is Democracy on Hold? Kujenga Amani, 22 February 2019.
(2018) Peppering Patriarchy: Re-imagining/Re-making Femaleness in Ghana through Social Media, The CIHA Blog, Conference Paper presented at the African Studies Association annual meeting, Chicago, 15–19 November 2017.
Award Information
The rise of post-9/11 terrorism in Africa, as globally, has produced myriad anti-terror laws and strategies. Being militarized because they securitize terror, many of these approaches do not embed sufficiently the multiple ways in which women experience and engage with political violence, broadly as supporters and preventers. Based on the feminist premise that militarism and militarization perpetuate rigid gender stereotypes, and the framing of Nigeria as a militarized, this study aims at a gendered assessment of Nigeria's war on terror in both policy and practice. Drawing on emerging literature and research in northeast Nigeria, the study interrogates representations of women in the formulation, implementation and evaluation of Nigeria's counter-terror offensive. It does so against the backcloth of the women, peace and security agenda and United Nations Security Council Resolutions 2242 and 2349 which together recognize (a) the centrality of terrorism to women's human rights in an unfolding global peace and security context, (b) sexual and gender-based violence as a deliberate terror tactic, and (c) the need for gendered data collection on the effects on women of counterterrorism policies.
