Feminist Approaches to Gender Parity and National Freedom: A Case Study of Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) Activism in Nigeria

This study explores one of Nigeria's remarkable social movements: the Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) activism - an act of feminist mobilization, national consciousness, and gender justice. The BBOG campaign emerged from the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls during a Boko-Haram raid on Chibok in 2014, which also represent another site of feminist resistance, civic engagement, and national freedom that was beyond another act of gendered violence. The BBOG critical framework centers women's voices and leadership within a national context governed by patriarchal norms and administration. BBOG thus provides useful material for analyzing how feminist approaches can challenge state inaction and establish new narratives of gender parity and national security. This study utilizes a feminist qualitative framework that includes discourse analysis and social movement theory to illuminate BBOG’s strategies, messaging, and impacts. We examine how BBOG's framing was more than an expression of humanitarianism, but an assertion of women's political agency as citizens. BBOG, through online and offline activism, highlighted both systemic failures in governance and security while also placing the gendered dimensions of conflict and citizenship front and centre. The paper argues that BBOG is a particular kind of intersectional feminist praxis that weaves together struggles for gender equality, the right to education, and democratic accountability. In addition, the analysis situates BBOG within a broader debate on African feminist thought, establishing how local activists redefined feminist resistance by infusing it with cultural, emotional and moral appeals that emerge from the "communal" values of Nigeria. The campaign has continued despite state repression and political fatigue, demonstrating the durability of feminist activism that challenges not only patriarchal domination but also authoritarian forms of governance. In conclusion, this paper argues that BBOG is a case where feminist work supports continuity between gender justice and national freedom. Through the linking of the personal to the political and global to the local, the BBOG reframed and redefined national liberation as inexorably connected to the liberation of women and girls. This paper has claimed that feminist activism in Nigeria is and will continue to an important transformation in changing and re-conceptualizing power, justice and collective identity.