Sara Meger has offered a thorough and generous analysis of Windows of Opportunity while raising pertinent questions regarding some of its implications and limitations. She asks whether women’s participation and rights in peace agreements, often nominal, are significant. Women achieving a place at peace talks is largely unprecedented historically, and there is evidence to suggest that the presence of women’s rights in peace agreements leads to enhanced rights for women in the postconflict state, such as the hastened adoption of women’s electoral quotas (Miriam J. Anderson and Liam Swiss, “Peace Accords and the Adoption of Electoral Quotas for Women in the Developing World, 1990-2006,” Politics and Gender 10 [no. 1, 2014]). This increased representation of women in turn prolongs postconflict peace (Sarah Shair-Rosenfield and Reed M. Wood, “Governing Well after War: How Improving Female Representation Prolongs Post-Conflict Peace,” The Journal of Politics 79 [no. 3, 2017]). As well, women’s presence at the negotiating table itself is correlated to a longer-lasting postaccord peace (Laurel Anne Stone, “Women Transforming Conflict: A Quantitative Analysis of Female Peacemaking,” 2014. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2485242 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2485242). More broadly, peace agreements and postconflict constitutions provide openings for women to enter reconfigured institutions (Aili Mari Tripp, Women and Power in Postconflict Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Women’s presence at negotiating tables and their rights in peace agreements are part of a larger story about the effectiveness of women at the domestic level who are linked into transnational feminist networks and the spread of global norms on women’s rights.

Meger asks who these women are who gain entry to the “windows of opportunity,” suggesting that the book is “bereft of class and race analysis.” The book does go into some detail to describe the backgrounds of the leaders of the women’s groups in the three case studies, noting that they possessed relatively high levels of education and were closely connected to international networks. In the Northern Irish case, in particular, the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition was explicitly cross-class, ensuring that the women in its leadership represented both Unionist and Nationalist communities, as well as working- and middle-class backgrounds. That said, broadening the scope of the research to examine those who are not represented at peace negotiations would likely produce a more nuanced understanding of those who are included/excluded, keeping in mind that it is primarily the mainstream actors—the political parties, militants, and mediators, predominantly men—who have generally not sought to welcome women to positions of leadership. The women’s groups, on the other hand, have worked to include those of diverse cultural, religious, and class backgrounds.

In their aim to be inclusive, the women seeking access to peace negotiations have maintained unity through embracing neutrality on various contentious issues of the conflict. Meger points out that such a strategy might serve to exclude “women’s groups whose objective is to name perpetrators and organize for political change.” I agree. The structural determinant of this strategy is the exclusion of women from other mobilizing structures; their best chance of success is embracing what Gayatri Spivak refers to as “strategic essentialism”—“the temporary suspension of difference for purposes of amassing power against oppression” to gain the broadest base of support possible (as quoted in Wendy B. Sharer, Vote and Voice: Women's Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915–1930, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). It is because women, generally, are in such a marginalized position in society that they embrace this strategy. If they achieve their objectives as articulated in peace processes, which include greater representation in postconflict institutions, increased diversity in expressions of political positions and orientations should follow.