THE ROLE OF ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION MECHANISMS IN POST- CONFLICT SOCIETIES: A CASE STUDY OF SOUTHEASTERN NIGERIA
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Abstract
This thesis examines how alternative dispute resolution (ADR) can be governed to strengthen legitimacy and stability in Southeastern Nigeria, a post-conflict region in fragile negative peace, where formal courts hold authority but lack trust, and community forums are trusted yet insufficiently safeguarded. The literature highlights ADR’s promise but often assumes that ‘local’ equals legitimate and gives limited guidance on structuring recognition. Using legal pluralism and social justice, this thesis analyses secondary scholarship, policy, and institutional documents, and draws on cases from Rwanda, Liberia, and northern Uganda for analytical comparison. Findings show that ADR’s effects depend less on cultural authenticity than on design: state control, voluntariness, authority structures, and enforceability thresholds shape legitimacy, inclusion and accountability. The thesis argues that selective legal embedding is a promising governance model: a narrow, facilitative, consent-based legal interface that gives limited recognition to community-settled outcomes without bureaucratic absorption, while recognising that recognition without social acceptance can deepen distrust.
Recommendations include piloting community and state protocols in Anambra, Imo and Abia, shifting monitoring from settlement counts to legitimacy indicators, and
institutionalising peace committees with safeguards against elite capture and exclusion. The thesis contributes a design-focused framework for hybrid justice that prioritises procedural legitimacy over coercion.
Description
This document is a master’s thesis that offers a rigorous and thoughtful examination of the role of Alternative Dispute Resolution in post-conflict societies, with a particular focus on Southeastern Nigeria. At its core, the thesis asks how justice can be rebuilt in a region where formal legal institutions often hold official authority but do not always command public trust, while community-based mechanisms may enjoy local legitimacy yet remain uneven in structure, safeguards, and accountability. Rather than treating ADR as a simple remedy, the study approaches it as a complex governance question, one that sits at the intersection of law, legitimacy, history, and social repair. Through the combined lenses of legal pluralism and social justice theory, the thesis explores the layered reality of dispute resolution in Southeastern Nigeria, where customary institutions, informal forums, and state systems coexist, overlap, and at times compete. It situates the region within a post-conflict framework shaped not only by the legacy of the Nigerian Civil War, but also by continuing forms of mistrust, marginalization, insecurity, and unresolved grievance. In doing so, the document moves beyond a descriptive account of ADR and instead offers a critical analysis of the conditions under which it can foster inclusion, procedural fairness, social cohesion, and durable peace. Comparative insights from other African post-conflict contexts further strengthen the study’s analytical depth and policy relevance. What gives the thesis its distinct intellectual contribution is its argument that the value of ADR lies not merely in its local or informal character, but in its design. The document advances the idea of selective legal embedding: a careful, limited, and consent-based approach through which community-settled outcomes can receive recognition without being absorbed into heavy-handed state control. In this sense, the thesis is both scholarly and practical. It is a work of academic research, but also a policy-oriented intervention that seeks to imagine forms of justice capable of restoring legitimacy without reproducing domination. Altogether, the document presents ADR not as a romanticized alternative to formal law, but as a strategically governable mechanism for post-conflict stability, recognition, and institutional repair.
Keywords
Post-Conflict, Alternative Dispute Resolution, Hybrid governance