Is Power-Sharing Bad for Women?

Is ethnic power-sharing gender-blind? If so, what are the consequences? And, what, if anything, can be done about it? This line of inquiry informed a 2-day workshop at Queen's University Belfast (QUB) in November 2015, which explored the intersections of ethnonationalism and gender in comprehensive peace processes, with a specific focus on the extent to which power-sharing theory and practice can address new challenges emanating from the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, as embodied in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) and other subsequent resolutions.

That conversation continues with this special issue. As the guest editors, we asked the contributors—many of them participants at the QUB workshop—to focus their analysis on three themes:

1)	The “gender silences” of existing power-sharing arrangements; that is, the ongoing barriers for women and other marginalized actors, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities,
2)	The impact of gender activism and advocacy on the negotiation and implementation of ethnic power-sharing pacts in divided societies,
3)	The opportunities for constructive linkages between power-sharing and the WPS agenda.

Their responses are methodologically, empirically, and normatively diverse. We have case studies—Bosnia–Herzegovina (Deiana), Cyprus (Demetriou and Hadjipavlou), and Northern Ireland (Hayes and McEvoy)—as well as comparative examinations (Lebanon and Northern Ireland [Nagle and Fakhoury]), larger-N considerations (Bell) and thematic articles on civil society (Pierson and Thomson) and feminist institutionalism (Ní Aoláin). Some authors stress the negative consequences of power-sharing, including its formal and informal constraints on women's representation and participation; others consider possible points of entry for women, including through the tactical use of UNSCR 1325 and other gender mechanisms. All recognize the inherent complexities of gendering power-sharing.

In what follows, we situate the seven original articles for this special issue within the larger project of what we call “gendering power-sharing.”¹ By this we mean the attempt to integrate a gender perspective into the theory and design of power-sharing arrangements. Both ethnic power-sharing and the WPS agenda are important norms championed by national governments, international organizations, and conflict resolution scholars over the last two decades, and yet these strategies are typically constructed in oppositional terms by both theorists and practitioners. Despite their burgeoning popularity, there appears to be a fundamental incompatibility in need of reconciliation. Thus, this special issue aims to contribute to the nascent research agenda on gendering power-sharing.

POWER-SHARING AND THE WPS AGENDA

Both power-sharing and the WPS agenda represent major normative frameworks of conflict resolution that aim at enhancing peace and political inclusion in deeply divided places. Both present compelling—if incomplete—visions for postconflict peace. Power-sharing is primarily focused on the political accommodation of ethnic groups. The WPS agenda is concerned with the inclusion of women in peace processes and the promotion of gender mainstreaming. Power-sharing is elite centered, operates within formal political institutions, and relies upon ethnic political parties to cultivate interethnic cooperation and political stability. The WPS agenda recognizes and embraces women's contributions to informal political processes, including grassroots organizing, but also aims at formal institutional inclusion. Power-sharing is a modular approach to conflict resolution that privileges the pursuit of stability. As Demetriou and Hadjipavlou note in their article, women are often told that “the time is not yet right” for gender interventions. The WPS agenda adopts a more holistic strategy, not content to wait until “later” to build in safeguards for women's equality.

Power-sharing is committed to the representation and participation of all major ethnopolitical actors in key decision-making channels. Specifically, it is a model of governance meant to include ethnic majorities and minorities in co-decision-making positions. In cases of violent conflict, it is also used to facilitate joint decision-making between former combatants. Institutionally, power-sharing consists of “those rules that, in addition to defining how decisions will be made by groups within the polity, allocate decision-making rights, including access to state resources, among collectivities competing for power.”² Consociationalism, the most prominent model of power-sharing, entails executive power-sharing, such as grand coalitions, proportionality in the electoral system and other sites of power, mutual veto rights, and group autonomy provisions.³ Consociationalism can be implemented according to a corporate logic, where the groups to share power are predetermined through ethnic quotas, reserved seats, and other mechanisms, or it can be implemented in liberal fashion, which allows voters to determine the extent of group representation, facilitated via low thresholds to cabinet formation, sequential portfolio allocation, and indirect veto rights.⁴ This distinction is important for assessing the ability of nonethnic actors to gain entry to the power-sharing arrangement. Corporate arrangements are thought to constrain opportunities for women to participate as women, whereas liberal arrangements, given their flexibility, hold more promise. As key consociational theorist McGarry suggests, “liberal consociations need not privilege ethnic identities, and are more likely to create political space for previously weak and marginalized identity groups than conventional majoritarian systems of executive formation.”⁵ As Nagle and Fakhoury note in their article, however, this only holds if gender and sexuality issues do not become embroiled in the larger ethnonational dispute. The two kinds of consociationalism nonetheless offer different opportunities and outcomes for women and sexual minorities.

Power-sharing theory has been challenged from numerous angles. Critics charge that it entrenches the very divisions it seeks to moderate; it is ungovernable, unstable, and prone to collapse, and; it is un-adoptable, or, where adopted, only agreed to in situations of mild divisions where it is not needed.⁶ Consociationalists have responded vigorously to these claims and have recommended power-sharing for both normative and strategic purposes.⁷ Its advocates acknowledge that consociationalism is “difficult to love,” but that it is a form of “necessary triage” that can stop ethnic fighting and bloodshed.⁸ Beyond stopping war, it can also facilitate political stability between divided groups; advocates point to the statistically significant relationship between power-sharing and a reduction in war recurrence.⁹ They also highlight its normative benefits as a democratic means for accommodating difference, cultivating a parity of esteem and ensuring ethnic inclusiveness as a response to protracted exclusion and violence.

Where the defence of power-sharing has been less robust has been in relation to its gender credentials. Writing about the motivating forces for the Northern Ireland conflict, which they see as primarily ethnonational, McGarry and O'Leary suggest that “class and gender questions have not been in the forefront of politics in Northern Ireland because they have not been in the forefront of voters’ minds.”¹⁰ The implication here is that it need not be at the forefront of analytical inquiry either. Beyond passing references, consociationalists have yet to systematically assess the gendered consequences of their institutional recommendations. They have had even less to say about LGBTQ and other minorities.

Consequently, despite the pragmatic and normative case for power-sharing, there remains a feminist resistance to it, particularly its consociational manifestation. In a field of inquiry that has rapidly expanded over the last 5 years, there appears to be an emerging consensus on the relationship between power-sharing and gender inclusion, which suggests that power-sharing (and specifically consociationalism) is bad for women. Deiana argues that “consociational agreements inevitably work to side-line gender dynamics of conflict and conflict transformation, hence producing peace settlements that are not only explicitly ethnicised but also implicitly gendered.”¹¹ Kennedy, Pierson, and Thomson echo this point: “the patriarchal underpinnings of conflict are re-inscribed in the formal political institutions that consociationalism creates.”¹² Meanwhile, Hayes and McAllister suggest, “power-sharing political arrangements sacrifice women's claims for equality in the interests of communal unity,” a point also made by Rebouché and Fearon.¹³ A dominant theme in this literature relates to what we might call the “gender silences” of power-sharing.

Adjacent to the power-sharing literature, a robust feminist literature also examines cases of ethnicized conflict, while identifying ways to improve the social and institutional inclusion of women and other marginalized actors. In particular, intersectional feminist scholars have been working creatively—and sometimes in concert with local and transnational feminist movements—to assess the extent to which the WPS agenda might be a useful vehicle to accomplish this. The WPS agenda, embodied in UNSCR 1325 and seven subsequent UN Security Council resolutions (1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122, 2242), addresses the exclusion and marginalization of women during peace processes and in postconflict institutions. UNSCR 1325 focuses specifically on the participation of women at all levels of decision-making: the protection of women from gender-based violence during and after conflict and the adoption of a gender perspective in postconflict processes and in UN programming and missions through a process of gender mainstreaming. Like power-sharing scholars, WPS scholars are centrally concerned with developing mechanisms to improve the representation of identity-based constituencies. Extraordinarily, however, WPS scholars, practitioners, and other advocates have had little to say about how the WPS mission might be realized in power-sharing theory and practice.

Although the adoption of UNSCR 1325 is a historic recognition of the centrality of women and gender to conflict resolution and peace-building practices, its impact has been underwhelming. Crucially, the realization of UNSCR 1325 depends on individual states adopting state-level National Action Plans (NAPs) that target the issue areas listed above. As of August 2017, only 72 countries have active NAPs. Even when women are included in peace processes, either through NAPs or international mediation support, women do not necessarily exert more influence over peace processes and agreements.¹⁴ According to a 2015 UN study on the implementation of UNSCR 1325, although most UN-assisted peace processes now include consultation with women's groups, they can be “symbolic affairs—lacking thorough preparation, representativeness, and follow-up.”¹⁵ It is clear that UNSCR 1325 suffers from an implementation gap.

IRRECONCIALIBILITY—OR CAUTIOUS ENGAGEMENT?

Given the feminist resistance to power-sharing, it is worth asking: is it bad for women? Although many of the contributors have pointed to an emerging consensus on this point, the special issue as a whole offers a more complex picture. As Bell notes, this claim is a contingent one.¹⁶ The argument is mostly based on single-case theorizing, mainly around Northern Ireland, which calls its generalizability into question. Moreover, it has not, as yet, proposed alternatives. Although the articles included here all demonstrate the extant blind spots within power-sharing theory and the barriers to women's inclusion in power-sharing structures, where our contributors differ is on what—if anything—can be done about it. One possible response anticipates irreconcilability between the WPS agenda and power-sharing, particularly consociationalism. The other we label as “cautious engagement,” as it recognizes the tensions between the two norms but nonetheless proposes strategies for alignment.

The first response invokes the “power-sharing is bad for women” viewpoint. Deiana points to the “darker” side of consociationalism in her article on Dayton's “afterlives” in Bosnia–Herzegovina. Gender concerns, she argues, get “caught up in slow-decision making, political deadlock and unaccountability which, perversely, the consociational provisions have enabled.” She draws her analysis from the frustration of Bosnian feminist activists with regard to the (corporate) consociational system. This frustration resonates with our own research on feminist activism in Bosnia–Herzegovina.¹⁷ A dominant theme in our interviews is that there is a gap between the commitment to gender equality and WPS on paper and what is actually held up in practice. Many of our interlocutors point to the consociational structure as the key barrier, whether it is because it reinforces ethnonationalism, or because the different levels of government rarely work in tandem, or because the institutions are prone to crisis, all of which serve to relegate gender issues to later. Most are pessimistic about the prospects for meaningful gender inclusion, despite the comprehensive WPS apparatus in place. This calls to mind Ní Aoláin's argument regarding gender orders and how formal recognition butts up against resilient informal power structures.

This frustration with consociationalism is a common theme in the different case studies included in the special issue. In Lebanon, as Nagle and Fakhoury detail, LGBTQ organizations struggle with whether and how to engage the corporate consociational system, which is seen as patriarchal, heteronormative, and unable to transcend sectarian divisions, prompting a need for “radical opposition” to consociationalism. In Northern Ireland, which has a liberal consociational framework, this frustration manifests in different ways. First, while the system has some important entry points for women and sexual minorities, such groups run the risk either that their issues get “coopted” into the wider ethnonational dispute, which has been the case for marriage equality, or sidelined by rare displays of agreement between the ethnonational parties, as with restrictions on women's reproductive rights (Nagle and Fakhoury, this issue). Second, as Hayes and McEvoy highlight, women's party attachment—particularly Protestant women—cannot be taken for granted by the dominant parties. Their article is an important reminder that power-sharing institutions may fail to deliver balanced representation of majority ethnonational communities too. Whereas Pierson and Thomson (this issue) want to move beyond an elite focus on parties, there are still problems of representation within ethnic parties that require feminist intervention.

The perspective that power-sharing is bad for women is also closely connected with the social transformationist literature, which has long critiqued consociationalism as elitist, institutionalist, and overly focused on ethnonational communities at the expense of more emancipatory identities, such as gender or class.¹⁸ Pierson and Thomson's article echoes these charges, suggesting that power-sharing theory is too dismissive of civil society; a dismissal, they note, that has negative consequences for women, given that this is where the bulk of women's political activism is located. Whereas they propose two strategies for how power-sharing theory may incorporate civil society—Civic Forum-type arrangements and UNSCR 1325 National Action Plans, both with lacklustre pedigrees in practice—they remain skeptical of consociationalism's ability to overcome what they see as its “conservative understandings of ‘politics’ and ‘conflict.’”

We agree that advocating only for women's formal inclusion in politics can run the risk of depoliticizing feminist goals.¹⁹ Certainly, important feminist work, including the transversal or cross-community activism Pierson and Thomson highlight, is accomplished in civil society spaces; and power-sharing advocates should be paying attention to these spaces too. There is an attendant risk of reifying and romanticizing “women” as a group in our analyses of women-centered civil society activism, however, especially if we find that women can and should work toward transcending ethnonational identities. We should be cautious of treating women as a discrete and unitary category of analysis, in much the same way that power-sharing—as Pierson and Thomson point out—treat ethnonational categories. We suggest that a feminist intersectional analysis, along the lines developed by many of the contributors in this issue, might encourage us to take seriously the multiple social locations and identities that animate women's activism in conflict and postconflict periods, including at the intersections of sexuality, class, and ethnonational identities. In our view, we can accept that civil society spaces—in many intercommunity and intracommunity varieties—can be important sites of feminist engagement, while still demanding that women and other marginalized groups are better represented in power-sharing institutions.

Before accepting that power-sharing is bad for women, we must address two challenges to this perspective. First, by focusing on single case studies, this viewpoint runs the risk of assuming something about the theory that may be specific to the case. Bell's contribution to the special issue highlights this particular weakness of power-sharing critiques. Certainly, one of the objectives of this special issue has been to widen our case selection, thus strengthening our ability to identify comparative trends. This is just the starting point. Many of the case studies are also examples of power-sharing pacts adopted prior to UNSCR 1325. More comparative work is needed, particularly on cases adopted after 2000, which will enable us to articulate how the WPS agenda has made a difference. Demetriou and Hadjipavlou begin this important work in their article, outlining how feminist activists in Cyprus utilized UNSCR 1325 to their advantage during peace talks. With the failure of the Crans-Montana talks in 2017, it remains uncertain what impact the WPS agenda could have in a reunited Cyprus. Nevertheless, there are lessons to draw from the experiences of the Gender Advisory Team, not least of which is the issue of equivocality—or the gap between what GAT said and what the UN and the ethnic leaders heard.

The second issue is one of causality. Critical interventions in power-sharing need to be clear about the causes of women's persistent political exclusion: is it the consociational institutions (or, indeed, other forms power-sharing) that are bad for women, or is it entrenched and unresolved traditions of ethnonational chauvinism? Another way to get at this problem is to consider the extent to which the pursuit of gender equality and the realization of the WPS agenda is any more successful (or not) in non-power-sharing—but still divided—societies. Perhaps the broader conclusion, after all, is that politics is bad for women. Certainly, the challenges of women's descriptive and substantive representation are not unique to consociational systems. We must therefore endeavor to be more precise about the causal mechanisms at play. If we unpack consociationalism, we begin to see that many of its individual institutions are compatible with—indeed closely mirror—feminist demands, including list-proportional representation and legislative and executive quotas. Elsewhere, we have demonstrated how the four consociational institutions can be gender mainstreamed to enhance levels of women's formal representation.²⁰ If the problem is not power-sharing per se but rather the persistence of masculinist and militarized ethnonational ideologies, then both power-sharing scholars and their feminist critics may find common cause: defusing ethnonational tensions through democratic institutional innovations. Feminist institutional scholarship, highlighted in Ní Aoláin's article, (this issue) may be an important resource for designing such inclusive institutions.

Regardless of whether our contributors have found that it is power-sharing or that it is ethnonational chauvinism that is bad for women, most adopt what we call a strategy of “cautious engagement” with the theory.²¹ Their approach is a cautious one because they are all too aware of the ongoing gender silences in power-sharing theory and practice. Nevertheless, they are willing to seek out strategies for gendering power-sharing. Bell sets out the rationale in her contribution:

As “women-unfriendly” as political power-sharing arrangements are (although I suggest the picture is a mixed one), rather than decry them, women need practical strategies of engagement capable or re-shaping them. Power-sharing arrangements are an inevitable result of negotiations between political/military elites necessary to ending the immediate conflict, and ending conflict is usually a vital first step to improving women's lives in fragile and conflict-affected states, without which improving equality and development outcomes is very difficult.

This has been the logic employed by GAT in Cyprus, despite the reluctance of negotiators to accept GAT's “change of script” mentality. As Demetriou and Hadjipavlou explain, “GAT has had to continue to work within the process, as frustrating as it has been, or risk being dismissed as irrelevant ‘when the time is (finally) right.’”

We are sympathetic to a strategy of cautious engagement—indeed, we invoke it in our own work—but we recognize that it can be challenged on at least three fronts. The first concerns the kinds of solutions proposed for women's formal inclusion, many of which mirror the logic of corporate consociationalism, such as legislative quotas. Much careful theorizing—by both feminists and consociationalists—has shown that ethnic groups are neither monolithic nor homogeneous and that privileging ethnic identities in governance risk reifying the group. This is why most academic consociationalists prefer liberal to corporate arrangements, which constrains such tendencies. Consequently, recommendations are required that reify neither ethnicity nor gender and that extend beyond quotas. Second, as the contributions by Ní Aoláin and Demetriou and Hadjipavlou make clear, formal inclusion is insufficient, both for reasons of equivocality and because the prevailing gender order infiltrates informal spaces. Although we may be able to invoke the WPS agenda to “gender-mainstream” institutional arrangements, a project of gendering power-sharing cannot end with formal inclusion.

Third, we would be remiss if we did not address a growing disenchantment with UNSCR 1325 in feminist scholarship.²² Indeed, feminist scholars are, for good reason, increasingly skeptical of WPS's ability to influence conflict resolution processes and improve women's social and political inclusion in post-conflict periods.²³ While our question in this special issue is whether power-sharing is bad for women, some feminist scholars are asking whether WPS is bad for women—or at least not helpful. Of course, although we should pay attention to these critiques and take WPS's lackluster performance seriously, it remains the case that the WPS agenda continues to frame feminist discussions around antiwar activism, conflict resolution, and postconflict political transitions, at least for now. UNSCR 1325 and subsequent resolutions have not created the kinds of shifts advocates had hoped for, given that women are still regularly and systematically excluded from national peace talks. Champions of WPS, however, encourage us to recognize that national and international actors are facing new pressures today to consider women and gender in their work, thanks to WPS.²⁴

In one way or another, all of the articles in the special issue are sensitive to critiques of WPS and power-sharing, but they recognize that both streams remain important and influential norms in conflict resolution and peace-building practices today. Further, Demetriou and Hadjipavlou's contribution demonstrates that despite feminist critics of WPS, it continues to serve as a useful tool for women to advocate for political inclusion. Nonetheless, a strategy of cautious engagement still has some way to go. It requires that power-sharing theorists take gender seriously in their analyses. By the same token, it also needs WPS scholars to engage critically with power-sharing theory. The article by Hayes and McEvoy encapsulates both these points. They remind power-sharing theorists that “the extent to which parties and their leaders benefit from the support of women is neither uniform nor gender neutral” and they call on scholars to pay further attention not just to the differential impacts of power-sharing on women vis-à-vis men, but to focus on the different experiences of different groups of women under such arrangements. In this way, they invoke the sort of intellectual collaboration needed to make the project of gendering power-sharing work.

CONCLUSION

Whereas power-sharing theory was once quite narrow in terms of theoretical design and research agenda—focusing first on political divisions in relatively peaceful polities in the 1960s and 1970s and moving to a concentration on elite ethnonational divisions in conflict zones in the 1990s and 2000s—recent scholarship, including the contributions here, has challenged this focus, which left little room to bring in other actors such as women. The research agenda on gendering power-sharing confronts the consequences of the ongoing gender blindness of power-sharing theory and practice and contributes three important insights. It can provide the basis for comparative empirical verification of the barriers to inclusion for women and sexual minorities under consociational rules; it can specify the various responses and mobilization techniques of gender activists, whether that has been to “radically oppose” consociationalism or to cautiously engage with it, and; it can articulate a series of proposals for aligning the normative objectives of power-sharing and the WPS agenda.

While the articles in this special issue are all empirically and conceptually rich, they are only the starting point for the project of gendering power-sharing. We believe that future research in this area, along the lines suggested in this opening article and as presented in the seven articles to come, can allow for robust normative, empirical, and methodological inquiries on the intersection of power-sharing and the WPS agenda. This, in turn, can contribute to the pursuit of more peaceful, equitable, and resilient forms of conflict resolution in deeply divided societies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank all of the participants at the “Power-Sharing Pacts and the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda” workshop, the anonymous reviewers for the special issue, Timofey Agarin, Adrian Guelke, Kyle Burdy, and Elisa Carbonaro. We especially thank Leigh Spanner for her excellent research assistance.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge the funding support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Siobhan Byrne

Siobhan Byrne is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Certificate in Peace and Post-Conflict Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Her teaching and research focus on post-conflict transitions to peace, feminist anti-war activism, and feminist interventions in International Relations. E-mail: [email protected]

Allison Mcculloch

Allison McCulloch is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brandon University, Manitoba, Canada. Her research considers the design of power-sharing arrangements, their incentives for moderation and extremism and whether they can be made more inclusive of identities beyond the ethno-national divide. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

1. Siobhan Byrne and Allison McCulloch, “Gendering Power-Sharing,” in Power-Sharing: Empirical and Normative Challenges, edited by Allison McCulloch and John McGarry (London: Routledge, 2017).

2. Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie, “Institutionalizing Peace: Power Sharing and Post-Civil War Conflict Management,” American Journal of Political Science 47, no. 2 (2003): 320.

3. The literature on consociationalism and power-sharing is extensive. See, for example, Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Lijphart, Thinking about Democracy: Power-Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2009); Stefan Wolff, “Post-Conflict Statebuilding: The Debate on Institutional Choice,” Third World Quarterly 32, no. 10 (2011): 1777–1802; Joanne McEvoy, Power-Sharing Executives: Governing in Bosnia, Macedonia, and Northern Ireland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Allison McCulloch and John McGarry, eds., Power-Sharing: Empirical and Normative Challenges (London: Routledge, 2017).

4. Allison McCulloch, “Consociational Settlements in Divided Societies: The Liberal-Corporate Distinction,” Democratization 21, no. 3 (2014): 501–18; John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, “Iraq's Constitution of 2005: Liberal Consociation as Political Prescription,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 5, no. 4 (2007):670–98.

5. John McGarry, “What Explains the Performance of Power-Sharing Settlements?” in Power-Sharing: Empirical and Normative Challenges, edited by Allison McCulloch and John McGarry (London: Routledge, 2017), 282.

6. See, for example, Donald Horowitz, ”Ethnic Power-Sharing: Three Big Problems,” Journal of Democracy 5 (2014): 5–20; Philip Roeder and Donald Rothchild, “Power-Sharing as Impediment to Peace and Democracy,” in Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil Wars, edited by Donald Rothchild and Philip G. Roeder (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Rupert Taylor, “The Injustice of a Consociational Solution to the Northern Ireland Problem,” in Consociational Theory: McGarry & O'Leary and the Northern Ireland Conflict, ed. Rupert Taylor (London: Routledge, 2009).

7. Arend Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Brendan O'Leary, “Debating Consociational Politics: Normative and Explanatory Argument,” in From Power-Sharing to Democracy: Post-Conflict Institutions in Ethnically Divided Societies, edited by Sid Noel (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005); John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, “Power Shared After the Death of Thousands,” in Consociational Theory: McGarry & O'Leary and the Northern Ireland Conflict, edited by Rupert Taylor (London: Routledge, 2009).

8. Paul Mitchell and Geoffrey Evans, “Ethnic Party Competition and the Dynamics of Power-Sharing in Northern Ireland,” in Consociational Theory: McGarry & O'Leary and the Northern Ireland Conflict, ed. Rupert Taylor (London: Routledge, 2009), 146; O'Leary, “Debating Consociational Politics.”

9. Brendan O'Leary, “Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places: An Advocate's Introduction,” in Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places, edited by Joanne McEvoy and Brendan O'Leary (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Michaela Mattes and Burcu Savun, “Fostering Peace After Civil War: Commitment Problems and Agreement Design,” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2009): 737–59.

10. McGarry and O'Leary, “Power Shared After the Death of Thousands.”

11. Maria-Adriana Deiana, “To Settle for a Gendered Peace? Spaces for Feminist Grassroots Mobilization in Northern Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Citizenship Studies 20, no. 1 (2016): 99–114.

12. Ronan Kennedy, Claire Pierson, and Jennifer Thomson, “Challenging Identity Hierarchies: Gender and Consociationalism,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 18, no. 3 (2016): 618–33.

13. Bernadette C. Hayes and Ian McAllister, “Gender and Consociational Power-Sharing in Northern Ireland,” International Political Science Review 34, no. 2 (2012): 124; Rachel Rebouché and Kate Fearon, “Overlapping Identities: Power Sharing and Women's Rights.” in: Power Sharing: New Challenges for Divided Societies, edited by Ian O'Flynn and David Russell (London: Pluto Press, 2005).

14. Thania Paffenholz, Nick Ross, Steven Dixon, Anna-Lena Schluchter, and Jacqui True, Making Women Count—Not Just Counting Women: Assessing Women's Inclusion and Influence on Peace Negotiations (Geneva: Inclusive Peace and Transition Initiative and UN Women, 2016), 20.

15. Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace: A Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (New York: UN Women, 2015), 45.

16. See also Christine Bell, Unsettling Bargains? Power-Sharing and the Inclusion of Women in Peace Negotiations (New York: UN Women, 2015).

17. McCulloch has undertaken two rounds of research interviews in Bosnia on the relationship between the WPS agenda and consociationalism (2011, 2015).

18. See Taylor, “The Injustice of a Consociational Solution.”

19. See, for example, True, who argues: “gender mainstreaming may detract from and indeed serve to depoliticize gender equality goals and outcomes” in “Gender Mainstreaming in Peace and Security Policymaking,” available online at http://peacewomen.org/system/files/global_study_submissions/Gender%20mainstreaming%20in%20peace%20and%20security_Jacqui%20True.pdf (accessed 14 December 2017).

20. Byrne and McCulloch, “Gendering Power-Sharing.”

21. See also Fiona Mackay and Cera Murtagh, “New Institutions, New Gender Rules? A Feminist Institutionalist Lens on Women and Power-Sharing,” paper delivered at the FIIN conference, University of Manchester, March 2017; Caroline Hartzell, “Power-Sharing and Women's Political Rights Following Civil War,” Conference Paper, Workshop on Power-Sharing Pacts and the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda (Belfast, 2015).

22. See, for example, Nicola Pratt and Sophie Richter-Devroe, “Special Issue: Critically Examining UNSCR 1325.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13, no. 4 (2011); Laura J. Shepherd, “Making War Safe for Women? National Action Plans and the Militarisation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda,” International Political Science Review, 37, no. 3 (2016): 324–35; Marjaana Jauhola, “Decolonizing Branded Peacebuilding: Abjected Women Talk Back to the Finnish Women, Peace and Security Agenda,” International Affairs 92, no. 2 (2016): 333–51. 

23. The 2015 UN Global Study on UNSCR 1325 provides a critical overview of challenges facing the full implementation of the WPS agenda.

24. Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini, Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007): 88.