Women’s positions in society, political power, peacemaking, and peacekeeping processes have changed tremendously during the past two decades, bolstered by the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 and increases in female political representation. Relying on a multimethods approach and evidence from a range of postconflict and nonconflict cases, Women and Power in Postconflict Africa offers an impressively rich and comprehensive picture of gender regime change in post-1990s Africa. Using case studies and cross-national analytical data, Aili Tripp’s new book provides insights into key causal processes that enable a shift in gender norms and roles in the postconflict environment, and highlights the roles that women play as agents of change in a variety of conflict, peace, and postconflict processes.

Tripp seeks to ascertain the cause of relatively rapid and extensive change in gender regimes, or “gender-based systems of hierarchy and power within social systems or institutions” (p. 33), in many African countries over the past two decades. Simply put, postconflict cases in post-1990s Africa exhibit changes in these gender regimes that nonconflict cases do not. Conflict induces gender disruptions, which relatively autonomous women’s movements and international influences build upon in order to reshape and improve women’s rights, status, and political representation. Not only do postconflict and nonconflict states’ trajectories diverge on this gender regime change, but certain types of conflict are most likely to result in these changes. Because they lead to more extensive institutional change via peace agreements and/or constitutional reforms, civil conflicts and conflicts that are longer and more severe are the most likely to exhibit gender regime change, in contrast to international conflicts or highly localized conflicts.

Tripp first compares three case studies that emphasize the specific contexts and processes through which gender regimes change in the postconflict environment. Her two successful cases (Uganda and Liberia) nicely underscore the necessity of all three factors—gender disruption, domestic women’s movements, and international influences—in effecting meaningful gender regime change. Her choice of an unsuccessful case, Angola, seems less theoretically useful. The case highlights that the absence of any one of the three factors may lead to a failure to alter gender regimes in the postconflict environment. However, all three factors appear to be weak or not present in the Angolan case, making it difficult to discern whether any one factor is more or less important than the others for achieving the outcome. Following the case studies, the author moves to an investigation of the more formal mechanisms that change the political opportunity structures. This entails focusing on the utility of peace agreements and constitutional reforms for enabling significant transformation in women’s roles and agency in the postconflict environment. Finally, comparative analyses of all sub-Saharan African states demonstrate that the achievement of improved women’s political representation and legal protections is greater in postconflict states, compared with those that do not experience conflict.

The wealth of new insights provided by a wide range of actor interviews in the three case studies is, by itself, a major contribution to the study of conflict processes. The interviews illuminate perspectives and motivations of (primarily women) social movement or nontraditional actors involved in the processes of brokering and cementing peace and postconflict stability. Such viewpoints are far too rarely discussed or credited as meaningful in the context of the literatures on conflict termination and postconflict political reform, which tend to focus on the motives and choices of such actors as incumbent government representatives, (men) ex-combatants, and third-party state representatives. When women’s roles are considered, often within the context of UNSCR 1325, they are rarely given credit for the sometimes tremendous influence they may wield through unconventional or nontraditional means and methods. Tripp quite extensively engages women as actors capable of possessing and wielding such influence, not simply by giving them a voice but by providing numerous specific examples of the ways in which those voices are able to alter political outcomes. For example, women’s preferences regarding inclusivity and cross-partisan or cross-group negotiations lead to the observable benefit of helping to achieve peace, for example, in Liberia (pp. 160–61) and Burundi (p. 166).

The book also pushes scholars to more critically evaluate existing assumptions about changes in women’s roles as both cause and consequence of a variety of peace and post-peace outcomes. Existing theoretical expectations about the ways in which women experience and are impacted by conflict have often centered around women’s limited roles as victims (of wartime abuses, as mothers and wives of men lost in battle, etc.) and beneficiaries (of wartime economic opportunities) of conflict. Tripp broadens the theoretical lens by focusing on the variety of ways that conflict can upend gender roles and norms to produce changes in the degree and type of women’s rights and women’s status in politics and society. By avoiding assumptions that women are affected by conflict only within limited contexts, Parts II and IV instead detail variation in the policy areas or degrees to which women are influenced by and able to influence their conflict and postconflict environments.

Although the author does not explicitly extend her theoretical framework in this way, one wonders whether specific women’s movement goals directly link to success in the postconflict policy outcomes that she observes. Perhaps the absence of women’s representation in the postconflict security sector in Uganda (pp. 68–69) reflects a failure to achieve women’s integration, or it signals a lack of its prioritization by women’s movements relative to other policy priorities, such as improvements in education and health-care provision (pp. 70–72). Future scholarship could extend beyond the book’s broader theoretical argument to investigate specific causal processes that connect whether success or achievement of certain policy outcomes reflects the goals of women and women’s movements, rather than the goals of international donors and scholars.

One final extension raised by Tripp’s insightful work is the importance of regional reform pressures in exerting similar or comparable pressure outside of post-1990s postconflict Africa. Other postconflict cases, such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Guatemala—where women served in combat roles, the political system underwent major reforms, and international agencies were involved in peacekeeping missions and postpeace reconstruction projects—all seem ripe for gender regime change. Yet in such cases, the absence of neighborhood effects exerted by regional organizations comparable to the South African Development Corporation may help explain the challenges and failures of domestic women’s movements to pressure for meaningful and substantial gender regime change. Though Tripp’s argument is designed to apply most directly in post-1990s postconflict Africa, future studies of postconflict cases in other world regions should focus on the effects (or lack thereof) of this particular factor on enabling change in postconflict gender regimes.