A. UNSC Resolutions as Sites of Feminist Intervention

Resolution 1325 and the subsequent resolutions have prompted the question of how effective such resolutions are in securing compliance from those at whom they are addressed, and most notably from the UN itself. Ten years on, research is beginning to attempt to assess progress in the implementation of Resolution 1325. In addition to the periodic reviews provided for by the resolution within the UN,Footnote ¹³ there have been attempts to establish benchmarks for the implementation of Resolution 1325.Footnote ¹⁴ Empirical evaluation of Resolution 1325 has largely concentrated on case studies. Analysis has identified both good and bad practice in terms of the practical implementation of the resolution by international organizations and conflict and post-conflict States.Footnote ¹⁵ In addition, more critical feminist scholarly analysis has questioned the strategy of using UNSC Resolutions to further gender equality, noting the trade-offs that occur for women, between influence and co-option, and between changing international law and changing the situation of women.Footnote ¹⁶ This strand of the literature is particularly concerned with the tendency of the UNSC Resolutions to advance protective stereotypes that essentialize women in conflict situations as either victims of sexual violence, mothers, or as uncritical advocates for an end to conflict. These stereotypes tend to marginalize women as political agents in conflict situations (and also, perversely, obscure the victimhood of men and boys in conflict). This literature questions whether advancements made at the level of policy are sufficient to outweigh the risks of reinforcing stereotypes of women that marginalize them politically.

This article engages with both strands of the literature by offering empirical evaluation—both quantitative and qualitative—of the implementation of Resolution 1325 with reference to peace negotiations and agreements. Our research starts from the premise that whether or not peace agreements address women is capable of discrete measurement by ‘counting’ where peace agreements specifically mention women or gender. Paragraph 8 talks of the need to adopt a ‘gender perspective’—a concept that goes well beyond whether the terms such as ‘gender’ or ‘women’ enter an agreement, to include, for example, how civilian/combatant distinctions are dealt with, provision for socio-economic rights, the role of customary law, or what conceptualization of equality underpins any new constitutional order. However, paragraph 8 would seem to require specific measures relating to women in peace agreement texts. We suggest further, that specific reference to women is a key indicator of whether a broader gender perspective has been used, capable of touching how the agreement is constructed in terms of gender equality. Increased references to women in the content of peace agreements could therefore have been expected post resolution, if this provision was being implemented by all those involved in conflict resolution. Full compliance with Resolution 1325, now reinforced by its successors, could have been expected to result in five types of peace agreement measures in particular:

• • measures that would ensure the protection of and respect for the human rights of women and girls, in particular with relation to formal political and legal institutions—the constitution, the electoral system, the police and the judiciary (paragraph 8(c), Resolution 1325)

• • measures dealing with the special needs of women and girls in post-conflict processes such as repatriation, resettlement, rehabilitation, reintegration and post-conflict reconstruction, in peace processes where such issues were relevant (paragraph 8(a), Resolution 1325)

• • measures supporting local women's peace initiatives and indigenous processes for conflict resolution, and to involve women in all of the implementation mechanisms of the peace agreement (paragraph 8(b), Resolution 1325; cf paragraphs 11 and 12, Resolution 1820), and

• • measures dealing with the issue of sexual violence (paragraph 10, Resolution 1325; cf paragraph 8 Resolution 1820, paragraph 17, Resolution 1888), and in particular to exclude war crimes including those relating to sexual violence against women and girls, ‘where feasible’ from amnesty provisions (paragraph 11, Resolution 1325; cf paragraph 4, Resolution 1820)

• • measures providing for the different needs of women in planning for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration and vetting (paragraph 12, Resolution 1325; cf paragraph 17, Resolution 1888)

Our research therefore both quantifies where peace agreements specifically refer to women and gender, tracking how the resolution might have affected these references, and identifies the ways in which these references deal with the issues targeted in Resolution 1325 as set out above.

B. Peace Agreements as Sites of Feminist Intervention

Before moving to this evaluation, it is worth considering why peace negotiations and agreements have become a focus of feminist intervention. Resolution 1325's reference to peace agreements responds to the post Cold War proliferation of peace agreements and the use of negotiated settlement as the key mechanism by which to bring violent social conflict to an end.Footnote ¹⁷ Peace agreements document agreement between warring parties in an attempt to end the conflict and establish politics as an alternative to military violence. Inclusion in peace agreement texts is therefore an important starting point in achieving other political, legal and social gains for women. The scale of the practice is quite overwhelming, with around as many States having peace processes and agreements as do not.Footnote ¹⁸ The documents in these processes include ceasefire and pre-negotiation agreements; framework agreements which set out the arrangements for substantively settling the conflict; and implementation agreements that address implementation of the framework agreement.Footnote ¹⁹

Specific references to women can be important at all three stages. Whether issues such as sexual violence are included in ceasefire agreements will determine what will be regarded as a ceasefire violation, what violations will be monitored, and often whether the issue will be further addressed in any comprehensive peace settlement. As regards framework and implementation peace agreements, inclusion of references to women is often significant to women's inclusion in post-conflict peacebuilding strategies. While in 1990 peace agreements were viewed as comprehensive ‘contracts’ between parties, they are currently viewed more as ‘roadmaps’.Footnote ²⁰ Paradoxically this shift has accentuated, rather than replaced, the importance of agreement references to women. The peace agreement as road-map defines the goals of the peace process and, further, sets specific priorities for a broad range of matters from institutional reform to socio-economic development, both for local parties and for international organizations and the international funders of the process. While the terms of a peace agreement do not secure the implementation of its provisions, and the omission of an issue does not mean that it cannot be addressed in practice, issues that are not specifically mentioned in the agreement can be difficult to prioritize post-agreement, and importantly, international implementation mechanisms and donor funding flow from the agreement's priorities.Footnote ²¹ In other words, although gender references may do little to further women's equality, without gender being mentioned the struggle for inclusion is even more difficult.

Addressing the status of women in peace agreement texts is significant not just for the inclusion of women in peace-building strategies, but for their future inclusion in the domestic political and legal order itself. Peace agreements have a distinctive quasi-constitutional quality, and sometimes even constitute or contain constitutions.Footnote ²² Comprehensive or framework peace agreements typically set out complex arrangements for new democratic institutions, human rights and minority protections, and reform or overhaul of security and justice sector institutions. Like constitutions they operate as ‘power-maps’ for how power will be held and exercised, as between the body politic and its institutions. Constitutions represent a higher legal order, the framework in which political disagreements and institutional reform are played out.Footnote ²³ In recognition of their importance, feminist analysis is increasingly looking to the development of constitutions as an important site of intervention.Footnote ²⁴ Peace agreements are similarly important because they ‘not only formalize political priorities but also articulate a nation's political aspirations and their enduring nature.’Footnote ²⁵

Yet, there can also be objections or concerns about strategies focused on the formal inclusion of women in the text of peace agreements. Peace agreements tend to revolve primarily around compromises negotiated in secret by political-military elites who are almost exclusively men.Footnote ²⁶ For feminists, means and ends are generally viewed as related, raising doubts as to whether provisions capable of delivering substantive change for women can be normatively propelled into agreements produced in contexts that permit neither women's involvement nor broader public consultation or democratic input. Requiring the participation of women in negotiations processes (a focus of all the UNSC resolutions) may do little to address how the priorities of peace settlement are defined or how peace is conceptualized. Even where strong gender provisions are conceded, the relationship between peace agreement text, implementation of its provisions and durable peace, remains largely unknown. Moreover peace agreements, almost without exception, involve international third parties in implementation and enforcement, and this involvement often has negative trade-offs as well as benefits for local women, whether through the sexual exploitation that often accompanies the presence of international actors, or because internationalization of domestic constitutional spaces can oust or limit, rather than enable, the possibilities of local democratic practice.

Two decades into the practice of peace agreements, these debates point to the importance of measuring the impact of Resolution 1325 on peace agreement texts. While evaluation of peace agreement texts only measures one element of Resolution 1325, this discrete and measurable element provides some sort of indicator as to how the resolution as a whole is being implemented. The strength of the measure lies in the fact that peace agreement references constitute a relatively concrete and quantifiable measure. It can be relatively difficult to measure the effectiveness of Resolution 1325's rather broad exhortations to ‘ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels in national, regional and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict’ (paragraph 1), or to assess how the ‘role and contribution of women in United Nations field-based operations’ has been expanded (paragraph 4). It is possible, however, to assess whether references to women have been included in peace agreements, provided that a comprehensive collection of such agreements exists. While further research is required to evaluate whether and how any references to women in peace agreements have been implemented, if there is no reference this absence has immediate significance. Moreover, we argue that further research depends on access to baseline data such as we provide here.

A. The Dataset

The research reported in this article draws on an ongoing documenting of peace agreements since 1990, by logging their names and categorizing their substance in a database.Footnote ²⁷ The resultant database includes 585 peace agreements in 102 peace processes (in 97 jurisdictions or inter-state relationships, five jurisdictions having more than one conflict producing peace agreements). The database includes a breakdown of peace agreement textual references according to the following categories: dealing with the past (amnesty, past mechanism, prisoner release, victims), undoing the legacy of the past (refugees, land), state institutional reform (criminal justice, policing, judicial reform, new rights institutions), enforcing the agreement (enforcement mechanism, international community, UN involvement), and agreement provisions addressing a range of other issues, such as women, civil society, and socio-economic/development. The database therefore enables texts of peace agreements to be compared with respect to these categories.Footnote ²⁸

B. Peace Agreement Definition

While the term peace agreement is used in databases and UN documents, there is no official definition of a peace agreement. The term peace agreement is not a term of art but a label attached to certain documents in a peace process. Nonetheless, a number of authoritative databases and definitions exist with much common ground in what is included.Footnote ²⁹ The definition of peace agreement used in the peace agreement dataset here is a broad one that attempts to capture documents significant to agreement between the parties in a militarily violent conflict. We adopt the following definition:

The concept of ‘militarily violent conflict’ is taken from the lowest threshold definition in political science literature, namely the Uppsala Conflict Data Program definition of armed conflict as:

This is a substantively lower threshold than that of ‘civil war’ (which typically uses figures of 1000 battle-related deaths in one calendar year),Footnote ³¹ and captures both civil wars but also a range of smaller-scale but protracted social conflicts.

This peace agreement dataset therefore includes: agreements in both interstate and intrastate conflict; proposed agreements not accepted by the relevant parties (but satisfying the definition above); agreements between some but not all parties to conflicts; agreements essentially imposed after a military victory; joint declarations largely rhetorical in nature; agreed public memorandums of meetings between parties; regional agreements aimed at underwriting or enabling agreement between parties to a conflict that is primarily internal; and implementation agreements produced to consolidate or extend framework peace agreements. Where specific pieces of legislation, constitutions, interim constitutions, constitutional amendments, or UNSC Resolutions were the outcome of peace negotiations, these are included in the collection. Where agreements were produced to implement or consolidate prior peace agreements these have also been included as peace agreements. We did not impose a timeframe requirement between peace agreement and violent conflict for it to be classified as a peace agreement.

C. Counting Peace Processes

It is important also to explore the possibility that peace agreement numbers increasingly result from more agreements within processes, rather than an ever-increasing spread of peace negotiations and agreements to new processes. This is important to understanding whether any increase in references to women is due to increased references across new peace processes, or to more consistent referencing within processes. There are some indications that while peace agreements continue to be produced in large numbers, they include larger numbers of ‘repeat’ agreements within peace processes, and fewer new processes. First, the number of intrastate conflicts is apparently falling,Footnote ³² while war-on-terror proscription of ‘terrorists’ (as most non-state armed opponents are defined by the states they oppose) makes negotiations more difficult, pointing to the possibility of a return to military strategies of defeat, as seen in recent approaches to ending internal conflicts in Colombia and Sri Lanka. Second, the change in peace agreement emphasis from contract to road map, and new research on the difficulties of implementation (such as the emergence of post-settlement ‘spoilers’ who then need to be incorporated in any peace agreement framework), indicates that peace agreements tend to beget more peace agreements.Footnote ³³

To attempt to capture this dimension of the peace agreement picture we counted not just absolute numbers of peace agreements, but also the number of distinct processes involving distinct conflicts in which these peace agreements were produced.Footnote ³⁴ This calculation involved some decisions as to what constituted a distinct process using secondary literature regarding the conflicts in question. Peace agreements that merely extended a peace agreement to include new sets of non-state actor were not counted as a separate process even though a different conflict dyad was terminated by the agreement's extension (eg Burundi). Conversely, in some cases different peace processes involved some of the same parties (eg Afghanistan), while in others (eg Colombia) a distinct peace process and set of agreements produced as part of a single strategy and initiative in a distinct time period and counted as one process, involved distinct parties. A decision was also made to count regional agreements (eg African Great Lakes agreements) as separate processes even though these linked to one or more underlying intrastate conflicts. While many of these calls can be challenged, we submit that the process figures give some sense of whether our peace agreement data represents a practice across processes or within processes.

D. References to Women

The texts of the peace agreements were analyzed and provisions making explicit reference to ‘women’ were coded. In addition, any reference to ‘gender’, as in ‘gender balance’ or ‘gender sensitivity’ (for example in new institutions established by the agreement) or ‘gender-based violence’ was also coded. Specific references to ‘widows’ or ‘girls’ and to ‘sexual violence’, or named forms of sexual violence such as ‘rape’, were also coded as references to women.Footnote ³⁵ Where peace agreements included reference to international legal instruments that specifically address women, for example CEDAW and the 1957 Convention on the Nationality of Married Women, this too was recorded. In two agreements the only reference to women was the fact that a women's organization had signed the agreement. We coded these agreements as mentioning women for the purposes of the study because Resolution 1325 specifically calls for the greater participation of women in peace processes, and this is often the single key demand of women's organizations in peace processes.Footnote ³⁶ Hence, we reasoned that these agreements reflected a specific reference to women in having been involved in the peace negotiations ‘as’ women.Footnote ³⁷ General statements or commitments of equality or human rights were not included unless specific reference was made to gender- or sex-based discrimination. Similarly, provisions addressing generic ‘disadvantage’ or ‘under-represented’ groups did not satisfy the classification unless the terms ‘gender’ or ‘women’ were specifically attached.

E. References to UN Third Party Involvement

We separately coded whether the UN was involved as some type of third party to the peace agreement. This enabled us to question the extent to which the UN has played a role in implementing its own normative standards by enabling cross-referencing with agreements which mentioned women. UN third party involvement was defined using the agreement text and documenting whether the UN, a UN agency, or a UN representative was party or signatory, mediator or facilitator, observer, witness or negotiator to the agreement. We did not draw on secondary sources in making this determination. Where agreements mentioned the UN elsewhere, for example, by calling on the United Nations to play a role in peace agreement implementation, they were not included in the ‘counting’ of UN involvement for the purposes of this study.

F. ‘Before’ and ‘After’ Resolution 1325

We arranged all agreements chronologically, separating agreements signed before October 31, 2000 (the date on which UNSC 1325 was adopted) from those signed after that date. Although it might be expected that Resolution 1325 would have taken some time to have an impact, the date of the resolution itself was chosen as the only clear point from which to measure. Full and robust implementation should have included rapid dissemination, and there is evidence in the case of UN guidelines on human rights which have still not been made public and have no legal status, having been circulated to UN Secretary General Representatives involved in peace negotiations with very rapid impact.Footnote ³⁸

G. Cross-referencing ‘Women’ and ‘UN’

The database coding meant that agreements making explicit provision for women could be cross-referenced with agreements which involved the UN as a third party signatory. All agreements could also be counted in terms of whether they were pre- or post- Resolution 1325. In other words, women could be treated as a dependant variable, and a UN third party role as an explanatory independent variable, for all agreements, and for agreements signed before and after Resolution 1325, so as to test both the hypothesis that there had been a rise in references to peace agreements post Resolution 1325, and also to test the hypothesis that a UN third party role correlated with references to women before and after Resolution 1325. This analysis is set out in IV below.

H. Qualitative Assessment

In addition to this quantitative data, we also assessed peace agreement references to women qualitatively. Using peace agreement provision, we grouped agreement provision under the main types of subject matter that they dealt with, for example, quotas in elected bodies, general statements of equality, sexual violence (agreements typically addressing more than one issue). This qualitative survey assists in giving a picture of the nature of peace agreement references to women. In particular, it enables us to compare peace agreement references with the issues singled out by Resolution 1325 as set out in II above. This qualitative analysis is set out in Section V below.

A. Numbers and Spread of Peace Agreements

The study involved 585 peace agreements signed between 1 January 1990 and 1 May 2010.Footnote ³⁹ This included 529 agreements focused on intrastate conflicts and parties, 34 agreements focused on primarily inter-state conflicts and parties, and 22 regional agreements where regional actors addressed the external dimensions to a primarily intrastate conflict. Within that period 399 of these agreements (68 per cent) were signed before Resolution 1325, and 186 (32 per cent) of agreements were signed after Resolution 1325. These agreements took place in 102 processes, of which 82 (80 per cent) were in train before Resolution 1325, and 44 (43 per cent) were in train after Resolution 1325 (24 processes having starting before 1325 and continuing past this date and 20 processes starting after 1325). These figures are illustrated in Table 1.

Table 1.

Peace agreements signed, showing figures for before and after Resolution 1325Footnote ⁴⁰

B. References to Women

Review of the peace agreements references to women established that out of a total number of 585 agreements, only 92 agreements (16 per cent) mentioned women. The small number and percentage of agreements explicitly mentioning women is perhaps the most significant figure of the entire study. This figure, it should be remembered, includes all references to women, including those which limited rather than furthered equality, and those with only one small provision; as we will see in the qualitative discussion any type of holistic consideration of women is rare (see section V below).

When agreements mentioning women are disaggregated with reference to the timing of Resolution 1325, 42 agreements mentioning women were reached before Resolution 1325 was passed, constituting 11 per cent of all agreements signed before 1325; 50 agreements mentioning women were reached after Resolution 1325 was passed, constituting 27 per cent of all agreements signed after Resolution 1325. These results are presented in Table 2. The results indicate that there was a significant increase in references to women in peace agreements after Resolution 1325 was passed.

Table 2.

Peace agreements containing a reference to women showing figures for before and after Resolution 1325Footnote ⁴¹

However, there are indications that this rise is relatively recent. If post-Resolution 1325 figures are examined only up to December 31, 2007 (ie agreements signed in 2008, 2009, and 2010 are excluded), then the number of agreements mentioning women drops to 25 out of 161, or 16 per cent—indicating a very slight rise from the pre-Resolution 1325 era (11 per cent mentioning women). This timeframe excludes multiple agreements in African conflicts, in particular those of Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Somalia, and Uganda, many of which mention women. This is a matter to which we return in section VI.

These last figures raise the question of whether the post-Resolution 1325 rise in references to women in peace agreements represents a broader inclusion of women in a greater number of peace processes, or more consistent referencing of women in particular processes which happen to have multiple agreements. The figures on peace processes assist in answering this question. If we compare the number of peace processes which referenced women before Resolution 1325, 26 peace processes with agreement(s) referenced women out of a total of 82 processes (32 per cent). After Resolution 1325, 19 processes out of 44 (43 per cent) mentioned women, while 8 of the 14 (57 per cent) peace processes beginning after Resolution 1325 had agreements mentioning women. This indicates that the rise in peace agreement references to women is due to new peace processes mentioning women and not just to references across multiple agreements within peace processes.

C. UN Third Party Role and References to Women

Of the 585 agreements signed between 1 January 1990 and 1 May 2010, 196 involved the UN as a mentioned third party to the agreement. Of these agreements, 130 (33 per cent of pre 1325 agreements) were signed before Resolution 1325 and 66 (36 per cent of post Resolution 1325 agreements) were signed after Resolution 1325 (table 3). The UN was therefore involved in similar numbers of agreements before and after the passing of Resolution 1325.

Table 3.

Peace agreements in which the UN had a third party role and which did not, cross-referenced with references to women showing numbers before and after Resolution 1325Footnote ⁴²

Out of agreements in which the UN was mentioned as a third party, 40 agreements (7 per cent of agreements) made reference to women. Of these, 16 (4 per cent of pre 1325 agreements) date from before Resolution 1325, and 24 (12 per cent of post 1325 agreements) date from after Resolution 1325. This shows a significant rise in peace agreement references in which the UN was involved as third party.

Conversely, of the 585 agreements signed between 1 January 1990 and 1 May 2010, 389 (67 per cent) did not note the UN as a third party or present. Fifty-two of those agreements (13 per cent of agreements) mentioned women. Of these, 26 (7 per cent of agreements in that period) were pre-1325, and 26 (14 per cent of agreements in that period) mentioned women. Again, this is a significant rise in peace agreements references to women. These results are set out in table 3.

These results indicate that the post-1325 references to women were more marked in agreements in which the UN was a third party. However, this statistic must be understood in a context in which, surprisingly perhaps, agreements prior to Resolution 1325 involving the UN as third party were less likely to reference women than agreements in which the UN was not mentioned as third party. In other words, the more dramatic increase in UN involvement in peace agreements must be read in light of the fact that it occurred from a lower baseline. In fact, even after Resolution 1325, agreements in which the UN was not involved as a third party were more likely to mention women. These observations accord with logistic regression analysis of the figures.Footnote ⁴³

A. Protection and Respect for Human Rights of Women and Girls with Particular Reference to Formal Political and Legal Institutions—the Constitution, the Electoral System, the Police and the Judiciary (paragraph 8(c))

Many agreement references to women might be considered to further this Resolution 1325 requirement with varying degrees of specificity.

B. Measures Dealing with the Specific Needs of Women and Girls in Post-conflict Processes such as Repatriation, Resettlement, Rehabilitation and Post-conflict Reconstruction (paragraph 8(a))

Twelve agreements in 10 processes specifically mention women with reference to processes of rehabilitation and/or reconstruction.Footnote ⁶⁴ For example the Public Statement—Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation, provides for basic services to women in displaced camps.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Liberia provides that the National Transitional Government of Liberia ‘shall accord particular attention to the issue of the rehabilitation of vulnerable groups or war victims (children, women, the elderly and the disabled) within Liberia, who have been severely affected by the conflict in Liberia.’Footnote ⁶⁶ In addition, four agreements specifically mention women with reference to ‘development’; for example article III.8 of the Agreement on the Resettlement of the Population Groups uprooted by the Armed Conflict 1994, in Guatemala, states:

Eighteen agreements expressly provide for forms of social equality or financial or workers' rights with specific mention of women or gender.Footnote ⁶⁸

C. Measures Supporting Local Women's Peace Initiatives and Indigenous Processes for Conflict Resolution, and to Involve Women in all of the Implementation Mechanisms of the Peace Agreement (paragraph 8(b))

Very few agreements (eight) specifically provide for the promotion of women's organizations and infrastructure.Footnote ⁶⁹ More agreements (13) provide for a role for women in the implementation of the agreement, either in general terms or by insisting on the nomination of women to key peace implementation bodies.Footnote ⁷⁰ Five agreements make specific reference to Resolution 1325 itself.Footnote ⁷¹ Three agreements, one of them a constitution, established a specific institution for women or gender equality as part of the new institutional configuration.Footnote ⁷²

D. Measures Dealing with Sexual Violence (paragraph 10)

Seventeen agreements make explicit reference to sexual violence.Footnote ⁷³ A further nine agreements make reference to ‘gender-based violence’ or violence against women, in more general terms, or by outlawing specific violations of women.Footnote ⁷⁴ As with provision on quotas, some textual provision appears ambiguous in how it speaks of the violation of women. For example, while the provision may have been important in preventing violence against women, there might be some concern at the use of the term ‘moral integrity’ in an agreement in the Philippines which provides that the parties ‘shall provide special attention to women and children to ensure their physical and moral integrity.’Footnote ⁷⁵

Resolution 1888, dealing particularly with sexual violence, in particular targets agreements other than framework agreements, such as ‘pre-ceasefire’, humanitarian access and human rights agreements, ceasefires and ceasefire monitoring, DDR, vetting, and reparations programmes. Out of the 26 agreements mentioning sexual or other forms of violence against women, 10 are in ceasefire agreements, 12 in framework or comprehensive agreements, and three in implementation agreements. Within ceasefire agreements, four agreements define sexual violence as a ceasefire violation, in very similar terms perhaps indicating the emergence of standardized language:

Interesting also is that only some agreements within processes mention sexual violence against women. In peace agreements in Sudan, for example, while the Darfur agreement and the Nuba Mountains Ceasefire Agreement mention sexual violence and gender-based violence respectively, many other agreements between the North and the South of Sudan do not. It may be that sexual violence was more a feature of some of the conflict areas and dyads than others; however, it may also be that sexual violence was more highly prioritized at some stages and dyads of the process than at others. The inconsistency of references to sexual violence appears to indicate that something other than systematic compliance with Resolution 1325 is driving whether or not sexual violence is addressed.

E. Exclusion of Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls From Amnesty Provisions (paragraph 11)

Partial amnesties, where provided, do not tend to specifically except war crimes including sexual violence, but rather except war crimes in general terms.Footnote ⁷⁷ As regards dealing with mechanisms established to deal with the past, such as truth commissions, seven agreements which provided for some type of mechanism for dealing with the past specifically noted that sexual violence or crimes against women should be dealt with by this mechanism.Footnote ⁷⁸

F. Measures Providing for the Different Needs of Women in Planning for Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration and Vetting (DDR)

Seven peace agreements noted the need to address the needs of women and girl combatants specifically; for example, the Ugandan Agreement on Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration, 2008, has relatively exemplary provisions focusing on the particular needs of women across its provisions.Footnote ⁷⁹

In the case of internal conflicts, non-state actors in particular will often be in prison for their conflict-related acts, frequently undistinguished from ‘ordinary’ criminals. As a result, peace agreements provide for prisoner release. Where women are particularly mentioned, it is usually in a context of being prioritized for early release. The four different processes mentioning women with relation to prisoner release did so because they prioritized women for release.Footnote ⁸⁰ In Nicaragua, a wonderfully essentialized provision on prisoner release deserves mention: the Managua Protocol on Disarmament, 1999, commits to the release of prisoners ‘in honour of Mother's Day’.Footnote ⁸¹

G. Miscellaneous /Other

The only other references to women found in peace agreements (six) are rather random. In two agreements in Bougainville-Papua New Guinea, as noted above, the only mention of women was as signatories of the peace agreement itself.Footnote ⁸² In Côte d'Ivoire, a peace agreement notes that foreign men marrying Ivorian women are entitled to Ivorian citizenship (with no reference to foreign women).Footnote ⁸³ In Israel-PLO Protocol Concerning the Safe Passage between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, women (together with men over 50) are prioritized for receipt of ‘safe passage’ cards.Footnote ⁸⁴ In Northern Ireland, the latest Hillsborough Agreement 2010 made provision for a ‘fit for purpose’ women's prison.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Sri Lanka an agreement's only reference to women was that women would be a matter ‘reserved’ to central government.Footnote ⁸⁶ Without more, it is difficult to tell what reservation of power signified and whether it did anything to further women's equality. Where power is devolved to geographic entities created to give effect to the self-determination of particular ethnic groups, then reserving powers to the central State can often constitute an attempt to ensure that women's rights are dealt with consistently across the jurisdiction and even to protect women against traditional or religious legal systems. However, such a reservation may also constitute one of a number of tools by which the centre consolidates its power vis-à-vis the would-be secessionist region, for example by imposing monitoring.

A. Few References to Women

The overall finding that only 16 per cent of peace agreements make any sort of reference to women is disappointing. Even the higher figure for post Resolution 1325 references to women of 27 per cent (from 11 per cent) indicates a long way to go before peace agreements systematically include references to women. The qualitative review of the nature of the peace agreement references indicates that many of these references are unsubstantial. There is little evidence of systematic inclusion of women in peace agreement texts, or systematic treatment of issues across peace agreements within conflicts. Moreover, some of the references are, at best, ambiguous in terms of feminist gains, for example: the use of quotas which not only encourage but limit the participation of women; reference to ‘moral integrity’; references to women as mothers to be targeted for early prisoner release or as victims to be protected from sexual violence. These provisions may well have played an important role in alleviating the situation of some women; however, as lone references in complex political processes the underlying picture of women they present is one which ultimately may also limit effective participation in public life, or limit which women are targeted by measures to those who fit the good woman/victim/mother.Footnote ⁸⁷ Our findings support findings of research into implementation of Resolution 1325 in other settings.Footnote ⁸⁸ Resolution 1325 appears to have been more effective as a focus of mobilization for women outside of peace processes than in securing women's participation within formal peace processes.Footnote ⁸⁹

B. A Post-1325 Rise in References to Women

Our data provides evidence of a rise in peace agreements references to women and evidence that this rise is more marked in processes where the UN is involved. However, correlation is not causation, and some caution is necessary before definitively concluding that Resolution 1325 has made a difference in promoting the inclusion of women in peace processes. It is possible that the same transnational mobilization that produced Resolution 1325 would have produced an increase in references to women in peace agreements in any case. However, well documented local and transnational activism using Resolution 1325 means that it is highly likely that Resolution 1325 has played some role in promoting references to women, whether directly by influencing those involved in negotiation, or indirectly by enabling women to mobilize and influence peace negotiations even from outside.

C. The Relationship of a UN Third Party Role

There is a more marked rise in references to women in peace agreements in which the UN was named as a third party. This rise indicates that Resolution 1325 has had a particular effect on UN intervention in peace agreement texts that is important not just for those texts but as an indicator of the UN's willingness and ability to promote Resolution 1325 more generally. Again, there are possible technical objections to such a conclusion. It could be argued that our coding of UN third party involvement has little relationship to whether the UN had capacity to influence text. Coding UN third party involvement only where the UN is formally included as a third party can be argued to be both too broad and too narrow. The UN may not have had capacity to influence peace agreement texts even where it was present as a third party, and may have had capacity to influence peace agreement texts where it had no formally acknowledged third party role. In rebuttal we would suggest that while there is some truth to both arguments, it is likely that a named third party role as signatory indicates some capacity to influence text different to a more oblique or less visible role because it captures a structural presence at negotiations. There is also precedent for expecting robust normative action from the UN as signatory even where it has failed to influence the text. In the case of Lomé Accord of 1999 in Sierra Leone, a UN Secretary-General Representative signing the agreement as ‘witness’, but finding the content of the agreement deficient in terms of the UN's normative commitments as set out in human rights guidelines (in this case because the agreement included a blanket amnesty covering serious international crimes), was instructed by the UN Secretary-General to append a ‘rider’ dissenting from the text's amnesty provision.Footnote ⁹⁰

There are, however, a range of possible explanations for the correlation between a UN third party role and a more marked rise in peace agreement references to women. Processes in which the UN is structurally involved tend to be processes which are internationalized more generally, because they correlate with levels of mass atrocity and violence, capacity for regional and international destabilization and attract stronger forms of international intervention.Footnote ⁹¹ These processes may in practice have created a more extreme situation for women, in which large scale sexual violence, displacement, and dispossession, are more easily understood by all the parties to the peace agreements as requiring to be addressed. Violence against women may be increasingly more visible and documented, due to feminist efforts to include it in formal definitions of international criminal law, and to have it recognized as an integral part of many armed conflicts.Footnote ⁹² These factors alone may explain the rise in peace agreement references to women, and why it has been more dramatic in processes in which the UN was structurally involved.

More negatively, however, it is possible that the compromises in agreements in the type of conflict in which the UN becomes structurally involved have a more imposed element, in which normatively driven references to women or gender are simpler to require. Interestingly, our figures indicate that the rise in peace agreement references to women is largely down to the increase in references in recent agreements in Africa, in particular in Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Somalia, and Uganda. Agreements in these countries involved the UN as third party signatory and contained multiple references to women. It may therefore be that conflict resolution efforts in Africa may be internationally understood to require a more normatively driven interventionism than in other regions, something that is backed up by government statements and international policy documents.Footnote ⁹³ While international intervention may be one of the only routes into a process for women, it also raises a troubling dimension for feminism's anti-imperialist ambitions. Yet, a number of other factors also require to be taken into account before such an assessment can be made. Clearly-focused local and international activism has taken place in many of the same jurisdictions in which gender provisions occur, often with the support of organizations such as UNIFEM.Footnote ⁹⁴ There is strong evidence of a regional embracing of gender. For example, on 18 June 2008, member states of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, civil society organizations, development partners and UN agencies attending a high Level Regional Consultation on Eradicating Sexual Violence and Ending Impunity in the Great Lakes Region, in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, committed themselves under the Goma Declaration to eradicate all forms of gender-based violence, in particular sexual violence, and to take appropriate measures for empowerment and equal representation of women and girls.Footnote ⁹⁵ In Kenya in 2008 the African Union appointed Graçia Machal as one of three mediators for the crisis.Footnote ⁹⁶ In Uganda, a National Action Plan was developed in 2008,Footnote ⁹⁷ and the United Kingdom in its 2007 update to its own action plan on Resolution 1325 notes ‘the appointment and posting of a gender adviser to the UN envoy to the Juba peace talks for Uganda’.Footnote ⁹⁸ It is possible that the African agreements are in fact examples of innovation with a connection to local activism. Further research is needed to analyze the dynamics of how and why provision on women entered texts with respect to locally asserted needs, and to trace whether implementation occurred and had any tangible effect.Footnote ⁹⁹ We suggest our dataset provides a basis for case study selection.

D. The Relationship to Agreements to which the UN was not a Signatory

Despite the more dramatic rise in post-Resolution 1325 references to women in processes where the UN was a third party, peace agreements are more likely to contain references to women in cases where the UN was not involved as a signatory. This fact indicates that internationalization of a process is not, on the whole, conducive to women but rather the more internal a process is, the more accessible it is to input and influence from women. As mentioned above, processes are internationalized on the basis of their capacity for mass violence and regional or international destabilization. In such a situation there may be a greater tendency to prioritize a fairly closed deal between military elites, formally negotiated in a self-contained ‘track one’ process.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These types of process are particularly difficult for women to access and it should not, perhaps, be surprising that the combination of extreme violence against civilian populations, regional actors, and multiple international mediators produces a process in which the possibility for women to mobilize and affect the negotiations is reduced. Case studies bear out the suggestion that local processes may be more amenable to input from women; some of the least internationalized processes, for example Northern Ireland, seem to have been particularly amenable to women organizing as women.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It is also worth considering whether the dynamics of locally-driven conflict resolution processes may be more conducive to the inclusion of civil society actors (and therefore women) and to finely balanced compromises in which a broader understanding of the root causes and consequences of conflict plays a role in enabling agreement on the military and political divisions originally viewed as central to the conflict.

Such a dynamic would tend to explain both our finding that the influence of Resolution 1325 appears to have been greater on UN internationalized processes, and yet why references to women remained more common in locally-driven processes. It is precisely in a situation of internationalized negotiations, often focusing on military-politico elites, that a normative ‘command’ to address the situation of women, such as is found in Resolution 1325, might play a role by ensuring that explicit inclusion of women is not swept away in the pressure to address ‘the’ conflict. However, locally-driven processes may still produce better results for women because of their capacity to remain open to a wider set of influences and analyses, in particular those of civil society actors. Case study analysis of some of the processes in which the UN did have a mediation influence and which produced relatively exemplary references to women appears to support the point. In Guatemala and Burundi, for example, both sets of agreements are striking for the comprehensive way in which they address the gender-specific concerns of women. In both sets of agreements the compromises between parties' political-military objectives and human rights and social justice analysis of the conflict is predominant, indicating that broader projects of inclusion, social justice and accountability were viewed as central to resolution of the conflicts in question. Both processes used innovative attempts to include the voices and influence of civil society, including women's organizations. It is not surprising that this was a context in which women's claims of inclusion were able to be heard and addressed.Footnote ¹⁰²

If correct, our analysis raises a key question for strategies seeking to implement Resolution 1325. Paradoxically, in locally-driven processes asserting the imperative of Resolution 1325 as norm is likely to be less important than finding a way in which civil society can influence the negotiations, and women can persuasively articulate the relationship of gender to the military and political divisions understood to be at the conflict's heart. Resolution 1325, and more so its successors, have been criticized as failing to capture the depth and subtlety of the connection between militarization and gender—a subtlety which would view every element of the peace agreement as relating to women as women.Footnote ¹⁰³ Yet for all processes, international or local, the ability to find a way to articulate these deepest connections between the politics of the conflict and the broader politics of exclusion may well be crucial to influencing an agreement's text, a matter to which we return in our concluding recommendations.

E. Fewer Peace Processes?

Finally, the research findings merit two further side observations. First, there would appear to be a ‘slowing’ of peace agreement practice, which itself has significance for activism around the implementation of Resolution 1325 and the situation of women.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The recent attempt by the government to ‘win the war’ in Sri Lanka, using massive military force hidden from the outside world, with little counter-pressure internationally despite years of internationally supported faltering peace processes, testifies to the stark alternatives to negotiated settlement. Whatever the deficits of negotiated settlement in human rights and gender terms, they are often better and more palatable than large scale loss of life and mass atrocity—with its heavy toll on female civilians and combatants.

F. Third-Party Shopping?

The second interesting side observation is that contrary to some other assertions,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ there is little falling off in the UN having a third party role from around 2000 on. It is true that an increasingly diverse spectrum of regional organizations, third party countries and even non-governmental organizations have ever increasing conflict resolution ambitions. It is also probably right to say that the UN is now less likely to be the main negotiator as it was in El Salvador or Guatemala.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ However, the UN remains a persistent third party signatory of agreements. This perhaps provides some basis for confidence that the normative commitments made by the UN with regard to what it will and will not sign up to, including its commitment to include gender equality, have not eliminated its third party influence. Nevertheless, the data also suggests that successful implementation of Resolution 1325 provision on peace agreements centrally depends on organizations other than the United Nations.

G. From Mention of Women to Change in their Situation

While the inclusion of women in peace agreements is often an important starting point to their inclusion in the post-conflict order, it cannot be assumed that inclusion in a peace agreement without more translates into greater equality for women. A danger of focusing on textual inclusion in legal standards is that such inclusion becomes an end in itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Indeed the strategy of using UNSC resolutions to advance gender equality in negotiations can be seen as very indirect: a strategy of attempting to change one set of legal documents, to produce change in another set of legal documents. The connection to any change in the status of women may stand at the end of a long chain of effort and activism, with every stage having its own attrition rate for women. When we turn to general literature on peace agreement implementation, the limitations of peace agreement texts become immediately clear. There are many reasons why peace agreement provisions are not implemented, either in their entirety or in their detail.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Peace agreements in Guatemala and Burundi, noted above for their strong and holistic treatment of women, provide rather depressing tales in terms of lack of implementation for many of the above reasons.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Even if the agreement is implemented, the provisions on women may not be implemented. Alternatively, the new post-conflict consensus may contain dynamics which lead to a retrenchment of women's rights in ways not anticipated by the agreement, for example, in areas such as reproductive rights.

Conversely, however, it is also worth remembering that the reach of Resolution 1325 is broader than peace agreements, and may enable women to argue for equality in situations where gender is not mentioned in the agreement. Even where women and gender are not specifically mentioned in peace agreements, the UN Secretary-General must report on this aspect of UN peacekeeping mission,Footnote ¹¹⁰ and Resolution 1325 itself mandates greater gender expertise within UN missions. It may therefore be that even where Resolution 1325 remains relatively ineffective in securing the inclusion of women and gender in peace agreement negotiations and provisions, it may still ensure that the exclusion or oversight of women from peace agreements is not fatal to providing mechanisms of inclusion at the implementation stage.

A. A Strategy which Cuts Across Complex Mediation of Complex Processes

Further thinking on how Resolution 1325 is being taken forward by organizations other than the UN is required, particularly as their role is increasing. The world of peace mediation is becoming ever more complex with multiplying regional organizations, State groupings of ‘neighbours’ or ‘friends’, third party States, individuals, and non-governmental organizations, all undertaking mediation roles, increasingly in the same peace process.Footnote ¹¹¹ The multiplicity of actors poses serious challenges for any attempt to ensure that Resolution 1325 has compliance-pull. Parties to conflicts are adept at ‘mediator-shopping’. If parties are not to have a choice between a ‘normative mediator’—that is a mediator who views their mediation role as requiring them to ensure compliance with legal norms—and a mediator who is not so constrained, then normative standards should apply to all.

B. Consideration of Which Barriers to the Inclusion of Women are Susceptible to Normative Command and Which Are Not

The patchy treatment of women and gender in peace agreements suggests that in many instances gender references are omitted from peace agreements due to ignorance and lack of gender awareness by the parties and mediators, the absence of women at the table, lack of openness of the process to input from women, and an overly narrow and militarized understanding of the issues that drive and sustain the conflict. It might be expected these omissions may be susceptible to influence, in principle at least, by a normative command to ensure the inclusion of women. Promoting Resolution 1325 as normative command could provide a counter-weight to these process deficits. Jenkins and Goetz, for example, argue that the particular forms of silencing and exclusion that occur around sexual violence, increase the importance of the normative command of UNSC resolutions in influencing mediators to ensure the issue's inclusion in peace negotiations.Footnote ¹¹² The increasing emphasis in subsequent UNSC resolutions on the need to have women mediators, suggests a strategic emphasis on this one structural change as a key to remedying all the above deficits. Sometimes called ‘add women and stir’, this strategy assumes that women mediators will be more sensitive to the gender dimensions of both conflict and conflict resolution processes, and more willing and able to use their power as mediator to influence peace agreement texts. These are all controversial assumptions.Footnote ¹¹³

There is, however, evidence of a much deeper obstacle to inclusion in peace agreements. There has been little consideration in the literature of the extent to which gender-specific concerns of women are left off the table, not due to oversight, lack of knowledge of how conflict affects women, or lack of commitment, but because of concerns that to include them would make it more difficult for the parties to reach agreement or destabilize any agreement reached.

The difficulty in achieving clear gender quotas in legislatures and executives offers an example of what might be two quite different dynamics requiring two quite different strategies. The qualitative assessment demonstrated cases where there was no clear quota of inclusion for women in a context in which quotas were a key mechanism for inclusion on grounds of ethnicity. The unevenness between requirements for gender equality as opposed to other forms of status equality would seem to leave general references to ‘effective participation’ of women vulnerable to not being fully implemented. There are several reasons why the inclusion of women may not be tied down to a specific quota including, of course, broader concerns about gender quotas.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, in States seeking an end to violent conflict where quotas for other forms of identity/political affinity and complex power-sharing have been provided for, it may simply be the case that the inclusion of women was not prioritized. Here again, a normative standard requiring inclusion of women might play a useful role in placing women higher up the priority agenda. However, where opposition to gender quotas is due to their being difficult to implement concurrently with ethnic quotas, and ethnic quotas are viewed as more essential to achieving or sustain a ceasefire; or where gender quotas are a deal-breaker for an armed protagonist group (for example due to religion), then a normative requirement, without more, may be insufficient to counter these dynamics. Human rights provisions in peace agreements are seldom entirely neutral in terms of how power is distributed between parties. They offer opportunities to insist on international monitoring, to promote particular democratic and cultural values, or to ‘water down’ or restrain majoritarian expressions of power. If fully implemented, such provisions fundamentally reallocate power.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Gender equality provisions have no special exemption from this dynamic. Cases where the inclusion of gender is seen as in some respects in tension with the requirements of peace are unlikely to be affected by the existence of a normative standard alone, as persistent debates on the so-called ‘justice vs peace’ dilemma relating to amnesties illustrate. In other words, there may be a ‘gender justice vs peace’ dilemma that needs to be specifically named and addressed.

C. Further Consideration of Good and Bad Practice

The qualitative assessment of peace agreement references to women indicates that there remains a vital role for consideration and development of good practice in peace agreement texts. The patchiness of references to women indicates that parties may not be sure what they can include, may not be marrying Resolution 1325 with the demands of CEDAW, and even that women may not be sure what to ask for or, more accurately, how to frame their demands in terms of a provision in a peace agreement text. There is little advice ready-to-hand on these matters. The case of quotas, for example, is a complicated one where women themselves will often require technical support to evaluate whether and how a proposed quota system is likely to translate into actual seats for women. Similarly, the language and conventions around ceasefires and ceasefire monitoring is increasingly a specialist one, where peace agreement texts specifying violations and forms of monitoring will control what can and cannot be monitored in ways that are difficult for non-military actors to anticipate.

The difficulties of inclusion are not just technical. Several decades of analysis regarding feminist engagement with law has demonstrated in many different areas how attempts by women to promote gender equality through formal inclusion in legal instruments tends to result in uneven gains and even costs. Our qualitative discussion suggests that in many processes there is a tension between whether women are present and represented ‘as women’, or as political actors motivated by other forms of political identity, or by complex combination. The difficulties of navigating the boundary between using gender as a category disruptive of traditional military and political assumptions, and ‘essentializing’ women as bringing a ‘different voice’, a different set of priorities, and a form of ‘transcendent’ identity politics, is particularly acute in the peace negotiation context.Footnote ¹¹⁶ These difficulties are equally applicable to strategies of promoting female international mediators. We must realize that expecting a woman with a high profile career, as one of the very few women in such a role, to ‘experiment’ with time-honoured practices of ‘secret negotiations’ and military-political elite brokered ceasefires, is to ask them to risk failure that will inevitably be put down to any ‘different style’ they brought to the negotiations, even where exogenous conflict dynamics are a more likely explanation. The world of peace agreement mediation is a highly competitive one favouring a charismatic-leader approach which is peculiarly male.Footnote ¹¹⁷

D. Further Development of ‘Gender Perspectives’

Resolution 1325 calls for the adoption of a ‘gender perspective’ in peace negotiations and agreements. Yet there is still remarkably little work setting out what a gender perspective for peace agreements would ideally involve. As noted at the outset it is clear that adoption of a ‘gender perspective’ is not the same as the adoption of provisions mentioning women. The qualitative analysis indicates the extent to which any wholesale consideration of how gender affects the totality of a peace agreement text is missing. While such an approach would inevitably specifically name women, it is not reducible to their random ‘mention’, but would touch more fundamentally on both the process and the substance of peace agreement negotiations.

A gender perspective for peace negotiations, for example, would pay much more attention to the question of who is given formal and informal access to the site of negotiations, and try to construct innovative ways of broadening access. Given that women are underrepresented in formal sites of power, and are more fully represented and even over-represented in civil society spheres, more attention to how civil society is enabled during a peace process would be likely to promote the inclusion of women. Promotion of local women's participation also stands to legitimate and thereby assist the implementation of resulting measures in a way that imposition by mediators will not. Requiring mechanisms to include local women in peace processes is therefore as important as the use of women mediators.

A gender perspective would also be expected to influence how the peace agreement deals with issues which do not mention gender but which fundamentally structure gender relations. As the growing literature on the relationship of women to peace agreements illustrates, gender is part of the sub-text of the socio-economic order,Footnote ¹¹⁸ of civilian/ combatant distinctions,Footnote ¹¹⁹ of definitions of security,Footnote ¹²⁰ of the traditional law/constitutional law relationship,Footnote ¹²¹ and of the constitutional approach chosen.Footnote ¹²² There is need for further thinking through of what a ‘gender perspective’ actually is, what its reach should be, and, again, how to manage conflicts between gender perspectives and the deal-making ambitions of the conflict's violent protagonists.

E. Space for Re-envisioning Peace Processes

There is a sense that one gets from reading peace agreements that the attempt to promote a gender perspective, while a necessary attempt to engage with the only show in town, risks buying into a highly problematic process to which gender analysis and equality can only ever be marginal. Achieving a peace agreement reference can involve ‘piggy-backing’ gender references to more general statements of equality designed for other purposes; large-scale internationalized campaigns to get issues like sexual violence or release of women prisoners discretely addressed some of the time; and becoming complicit in having women tasked post-conflict as ethnic reconcilers or agents of service delivery. This project stands as a loose summary of how women appear in many of the low proportion of peace agreements in which they figure at all.

A key difficulty continues to be the inherent paradox central to all peace processes, namely, that if those who are fighting fail to reach a ceasefire little stability or justice—including for women—will be possible, but if all justice issues are sacrificed to the achievement of a ceasefire, the ceasefire is likely to achieve very little in terms of transforming women's lives. It is difficult to find a feminist way through, whether the problem is resisting capitulation to military actors; the impossibility of finding a ‘family friendly’ way to negotiate concomitant with requirements of secrecy, artificial deadlines, and round-the-clock talks; or the need to buy into long-term militarized international involvement as the post-conflict price of implementation. At every level, these are uncomfortable processes for women.

Our final conclusion is therefore to argue for space to at least consider whether the peace agreement paradox is with us for all time. We do not seek to suggest that this should replace the attempt to engage with peace processes and agreements. However, in the struggle to survive conflicts and peace processes there is an abiding need to carve out a literal and conceptual ‘space in-between’ an apparently fixed analysis of the conflict as military fighting between men, and the fixed prescriptions for its resolution that flow from this analysis, in which women can question the parameters of the process as currently set.Footnote ¹²³ This plea for a space to be left to women to fundamentally reconceive the job of peacemaking might seem curiously abstract, luxurious and irrelevant when compared to day-to-day battles of inclusion and survival. Yet, a more general skepticism as to what current peace processes and agreements are capable of achieving is increasing, as is concern over their use as a vehicle for old imperial projects in new guises. It is important that we use the task of influencing particular processes to reinforce, rather than obliterate, the question of whether and for whom these processes deliver and whether there might be a better way.