By Nelson NseAbasi
A lecturer at the Akwa Ibom State University (AKSU), Dr Lucy Michael Iseyen, has been selected as one of nine successful candidates for the 2026 Individual Research Fellowship (IRF) of the African Peacebuilding and Developmental Dynamics (APDD) Programme of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), New York, United States.
Dr Iseyen, who is the Acting Director of the Centre for African Arts and Festival Studies and a lecturer in the Department of Performing Arts, Faculty of Arts, AKSU, emerged from hundreds of applications received from researchers across the world.
The fellowship provides a platform for the selected scholars to strengthen their research and contribute African knowledge and lived experiences to broader scholarly and policy conversations on sustainable peace, governance and development.
As part of the fellowship, Dr Iseyen recently participated in the APDD Research Methods Workshop in Porto-Novo, Benin Republic, where she interacted and exchanged ideas with ambassadors, policymakers, diplomats, researchers and international scholars on African-led approaches to peacebuilding, governance and development.
Her research project, titled “Between Ritual and Spectacle: Theatre, Music and Peace in the Ekpo Masquerade Festival of Akwa Ibom State,” examines the place and relevance of indigenous institutions in contemporary African society.
According to her, masquerade societies in many African communities historically functioned beyond entertainment, as they were embedded in systems of communal authority and associated with the enforcement of social norms, regulation of behaviour, dispute resolution and the maintenance of social order.
She noted that the introduction of colonial systems of policing, courts and administration of justice transformed the position of indigenous mechanisms of social regulation, with formal state institutions subsequently becoming dominant.
However, Dr Iseyen’s research seeks to establish whether indigenous institutions such as Ekpo have survived merely as cultural spectacles or whether their rituals, music, songs, spirituality and sacred authority continue to influence social regulation, dispute resolution and peacebuilding.
The study focuses on selected Ekpo masquerade traditions within their specific community contexts in Akwa Ibom State. Rather than assuming that Ekpo automatically produces peace, the research examines how its practices operate, how communities understand them and what evidence exists of their continuing relationship with behavioural regulation, dispute resolution and communal peace.
Dr Iseyen stressed that the rules, norms, sacred practices and perceived efficacy of Ekpo vary across communities, making it necessary to examine each tradition within its specific cultural setting rather than generalising its role across Akwa Ibom.
She expressed hope that findings from the research would move from communities to academia and eventually inform policy discussions on how culturally legitimate indigenous mechanisms of dispute resolution could engage with contemporary peacebuilding and formal justice systems.
She, however, cautioned against romanticising or removing indigenous practices from the contexts in which they function.
Speaking on the fellowship, Dr Iseyen expressed appreciation to Akwa Ibom State University for providing the institutional and academic platform that has supported her research and enabled her to take her work into international scholarly and policy spaces.
“I remain profoundly grateful to Akwa Ibom State University for providing the institutional and academic platform that has enabled me to explore opportunities such as this and to take my research into international scholarly and policy spaces,” she said.
She also thanked the Social Science Research Council and the APDD Programme for the opportunity to learn, interrogate and strengthen her research alongside scholars and practitioners from different parts of the world.
According to her, the experience has reinforced her conviction that Africa’s search for sustainable peace must take seriously the knowledge systems, cultural institutions and lived experiences of African communities.
Dr Iseyen’s selection places her research on Akwa Ibom’s indigenous cultural institution within a wider international conversation on peacebuilding, governance and development, while further highlighting the potential of African cultural knowledge to contribute to contemporary policy and academic discourse.
