Feminists have long used postconflict peace negotiations to get wider issues of gender justice onto the political agenda. But under what circumstances are they successful? In Windows of Opportunity, Miriam J. Anderson asks a vital question for scholars of peace and conflict: Why and how do provisions for gender equality get onto the agenda and into the agreements produced by peace processes? Examining nearly 40 years of peace agreements and comparing in depth the agreements concerning Northern Ireland, Burundi, and Macedonia, Anderson finds that the key is women’s participation in the negotiation process. Indeed, this central finding in the book resonates with the positions long argued by feminist activists: that women must have a place at the peace negotiation table. Structured into eight chapters, the book aims to clarify the conditions under which women’s groups gain the necessary opportunity to secure such a place, to get gender on the agenda, and to make peace agreements, some of which are more successful than others in furthering women’s interests.
It should come as no surprise to feminist international relations scholars or feminist activists to learn from the book that gender provisions in peace agreements are not bequeathed from some benevolent party to the negotiation process. Rather, in the three cases studied, and as evidenced in the cross-national data surveyed in Chapter 2, local women’s groups have rallied together to demand access to the negotiations. Women are not passive in the shadow of conflict; in all cases, they have made use of the “windows of opportunity” afforded by the political climate of postconflict transformation.
While Anderson’s findings have implications across a range of literatures, from conflict mediation/resolution and postconflict peacebuilding through norm diffusion and transnational activism, one of the book’s key contributions is in complicating a prevailing assumption in much gender and security policy frames that simply having women at the table or simply having gender-sensitive provisions in the peace deal will somehow translate into greater peace. Using a richly detailed analysis of two positive cases, Northern Ireland and Burundi, and one negative case, Macedonia, the author shows that women’s involvement in peace processes is far more complex than the “add women and stir” approach championed in gender mainstreaming narratives. Many extant accounts depict women’s involvement as a static good and requirement for achieving a peace agreement, without consideration of the capacity in which women may make the biggest difference. While this book confirms the need for women to be present, Anderson complicates the perception of the women’s civil-society members whose activism is key to getting gender provisions into peace agreements, showing them to be “complex actors with political objectives who view the negotiating table as a forum to advance longer term goals and interests” (p. 49). Windows of Opportunity clarifies the conditions under which women activists are able to make it to the table and influence the negotiations to advance greater gender equality in the postconflict state.
Although all three cases bear striking similarities, not all were successes. Thus, one of the most interesting aspects of this book is the discussion found in Chapter 7 on the source of the homogeneity of gender provisions that make their way onto peace agreements. Anderson notes that the language employed in most of the gender provisions reflects existing international instruments for women’s rights. This chapter answers the question of why the references reflect international norms almost exclusively. She finds that the degree of uniformity in the claims made by women’s groups and in the final gender provisions included in peace deals and, relatedly, in women’s mobilization during peace negotiations, is reliant upon transnational networks of women’s rights activism. While the latter point may lead some to assume that the uniformity is evidence of an “imperialist feminism” (see Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, “Challenging Imperial Feminism,” Feminist Review 17 [no. 1, ]: 3–20), Anderson determines that the same demands arise organically in different situations. However, the authors of these demands adopt a common language through transnational networks for strategic purposes. The case studies of Northern Ireland and Burundi show that it is primarily due to the exploitation of the language and avenues of international norms by grassroots feminist activists that women are able to participate in peace processes and put issues of gender on the table. Thus, the norms of gender equality that are argued by reactionary sectors in society to be “Western” and exogenously imposed are, rather, consciously adopted and adapted to suit the strategic interests of local women’s groups in postconflict states.
On this last point, it is interesting to consider Anderson’s findings in light of the growing politicization of anti-gender movements around the world. Consider how, arguably, one of the factors that influenced the referendum on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) peace deal was its normative association with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. In response to the inclusion of LGBT voices in the official peace proceedings, the right wing argued that the peace deal was creating a new “gender ideology” in Colombia and had to be opposed. Long before the October 2016 referendum on the peace deal with FARC, analysts were praising the agreement as an exemplar for future negotiations. Perhaps because 40% of the FARC combatants were female (though I think it more likely because of the group’s commitment to Marxist ideology), a gender subcommission was involved throughout the negotiations. As a result, not only do the final provisions directly address violence against women and the sex-specific issues that women faced due to the conflict, but alsoevery time the word “men” is mentioned in the deal, it is followed by “and women” (see Ana Campoy, “Colombian Women Made Sure Gender Equality Was at the Center of a Groundbreaking Peace Deal with the FARC,” in Quartz [29 August 2016] URL: https://qz.com/768092/colombian-women-made-sure-gender-equality-was-at-the-center-of-a-groundbreaking-peace-deal-with-the-farc/; accessed August 2017).
Right-wing defenders of “traditional family values” in Colombia, led by former president Álvaro Uribe, however, accused various peace activists and political agents of attempting to indoctrinate Colombians with “ideología de género.” The uribistas actively campaigned against the peace agreement, circulating pamphlets that read: “Colombia is in danger! Of falling under the control of a communist dictatorship and the imminent passage of a gender ideology” (see Roxanne Krystalli and Kimberly Theidon, “Here’s How Attention to Gender Affected Colombia’s Peace Process,” Washington Post [October 9, 2016] URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/09/heres-how-attention-to-gender-affected-colombias-peace-process/?utm_term=.6c6cc91c04c6; accessed 9 August 2017). In my own research in Ukraine, I have heard similar ideas expressed by combatants, who believe that the true enemy against whom they fight is not the armed opposition group or a political opponent but “communists, homosexuals, and pedophiles.”
This case reflects an issue raised by the negative case study in Windows of Opportunity: What kinds of politics adopted by women’s groups make them insufficiently neutral to be given a seat at the negotiation tables? In the Macedonian case, the groups were unable to overcome ethnic divisions that were salient in the conflict. But what about other political cleavages? In many ways, the Colombian example harkens to one of the questions raised in Chapter 2 regarding the extent to which the obviously liberal norms that translate almost verbatim into peace agreements are “good” and sufficient in and of themselves, or are read as tools of a liberal paternalism or imperialism.
Although Anderson finds that the grassroots women’s organizations mobilizing in postconflict contexts are agential and strategic in their engagement of liberal international norms, there remains further scope for critical reflection on the intrastate feminist politics that enable some groups and some individual women to represent “women’s voices” in peace processes. While the author notes in each case study that the women who could access the negotiations were those already connected to extant mobilizing structures (and thus, presumably, had a degree of legitimacy within existing social and political structures), these findings are bereft of class or race analysis. Given that the two cases in which women’s groups were successful (Northern Ireland and Burundi) were dependent, in Anderson’s analysis, on neutrality, it suggests that women’s groups whose objective is to name perpetrators and organize for political change may never be given a voice in peace processes. Instead of being able to evoke terms like “terror,” “occupation,” “repression,” or “colonialism” due to neutrality, women’s groups are required to ignore the root determinants of their material reality and claim a false equivalence in wrongdoings of conflict parties, which may, ultimately, contribute to a postconflict status quo.
There are, therefore, unraised and thus unaddressed questions that linger beneath this book: To what extent should we celebrate these “windows of opportunity” for women’s groups and their winning of both a place at the table and nominal provisions for enhancing women’s rights in postconflict societies? For whom are these “windows” open, and based on what structural and/or institutional preexisting arrangements of power? How vociferously should we laud the inclusion of these gender-equality provisions if they are based on an already watered-down, state-sponsored, corporate version of “feminism”? And how optimistic should we be regarding the effectiveness of these provisions in achieving real security for women in postconflict environments, given the prevalence of postconflict backlash and gender-based violence?
That said, Windows of Opportunity provides a huge service, making visible that which we have so long taken for granted in feminist security studies. By carefully examining empirical data on women and gender in peace agreements, this book reveals the pathways to participation. In doing so, it also provides a basis to begin asking further critical questions about the meaning of the inclusion of women’s rights in peace agreements for feminist antiwar activism.
