Agency and Accountability: Promoting Women's Participation in Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT

This contribution reviews international policy and practices to engage women in formal peace talks, post-conflict elections, and economic recovery, and finds a combination of factors contributing to poor performance in promoting women's agency. The fact that the privileged category for post-conflict decisions are those groups capable of acting as “spoilers” has tended to exclude women's groups from the categories considered most important to involve in decision making. Exacerbating this exclusion is the reluctance of international decision makers to encourage affirmative action measures in these contexts. This carries through to the minimal-state approach to economic recovery efforts. Provisions are needed to foster and invite women's voice in decision making, and build more active-state approaches to women's livelihood recovery.

KEYWORDS:

• Affirmative action
• agency
• community
• development
• discrimination
• interdisciplinary

JEL Codes:

• D73
• D74

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Anne Marie Goetz is Clinical Professor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University. She was Chief Advisor on Peace and Security for UNIFEM and for UN Women from 2005 to early 2014. She has written a number of books on gender and politics in developing countries, most recently the edited volume: Governing Women (Routledge, 2009).

Rob Jenkins is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has published widely on peacebuilding, governance reform, and politics in India, including Politics and the Right to Work (forthcoming), which examines India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. He was lead author of the Report of the Secretary-General on Women's Participation in Peacebuilding (2010).

Notes

1 See World Bank (2011a) for a review of post-conflict resource constraints.

2 A more positive recent example was the 2011 conference for South Sudan; see UN Women and Inclusive Security (2012).

3 One of us (Jenkins), while serving as an external consultant, was the lead author of the Report of the Secretary-General on Women's Participation in Peacebuilding (2010), while the other (Goetz) was at the time a UN official managing analytical inputs to the study.

4 See Pablo Castillo-Diaz and Simon Tordjman (2012: 5–10) for a description of nine different forms of participation by women in peace processes.

5 Inclusive and representative peace negotiations, such as the 1998 Stormont process for Northern Ireland, the 1996 Guatemala peace process, or the 1994 South Africa constitutional process, are unusual. They often take a long time, and are more likely to be found in very long-lasting conflicts.

6 This information was outlined in a document circulated in June 2013 by DPA (United Nations 2013).

7 An email request by one of the authors (Jenkins) to a DPA official to consult a past TAM report was politely declined on the grounds that such documents remained classified (personal communication, June 12–13, 2013).

9 United Nations Support Mission in Libya 2013; cited in Vanessa Farr (2013).

10 The Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) achieved an overall 10.3 percent spend on “gender marker 3” projects in 2012 (projects with gender equality as principal objective). In 2014, however, gender marker 3 projects fell to 5.4 percent of PBF expenditure (Sarah Douglas and Cecile Mazzacurati forthcoming: 6).

11 As Fraser (2009: 112) put it: “the feminist critique of bureaucratic paternalism has been recuperated by neoliberalism. A perspective aimed originally at transforming state power into a vehicle of citizen empowerment and social justice is now used to legitimate marketization and state retrenchment.”

12 Titled “Women, Food Security and Peacebuilding,” co-sponsored by UN Women and the Peacebuilding Support Office, May 19, 2011.

14 The potential for new forms of economic organization to assist women in reviving post-conflict agricultural economies has been noted as far back as the 1990s, even before the advent of the “post-Washington Consensus” (Birgitte Sorensen 1998).