Disentangling gendered peace: Observing gendered peace in policy

Abstract

Understanding where and how to bolster human rights is arguably the underlying motivation of most research in human rights and the greater field of political science. Increasingly, an emphasis on gender has been shown to prevent conflict and reinforce peace, thus demonstrating how a reinforcement of women’s rights benefits the sustainment of peace. Despite increasing evidence for this phenomenon, scholars have not fully explored the mechanisms through which a focus on women fosters and preserves peace. Using extant literature on women and peace, I identify two sets of policy instruments that may be more effectual than others in establishing gendered peace and preventing states from relapsing into conflict. I further categorize the policies into high-level and targeted policies and hypothesize that, contrary to intuition, high-level policies could be more effective at generating gendered peace. I test the models for each instrument using an updated version of the PAX-Gender database and find that more high-level gender policies are linked to longer-lasting peace treaties.

Acknowledgments

I would like to recognize the NSF funded workshop on Human Rights Law that helped shape this paper, along with its organizers Dr. Magda Hinojosa and Dr. Heather Smith-Cannoy. I also greatly appreciate the reviewers, who pushed me to refine my theory and models. Lastly, I would like to extend a debt of gratitude to those that provided invaluable feedback including Dr. Thorin Wright, Kathy Schauer, Elena Shumskaya and Bruno Cooper.

Notes

1 This is not to say that women mythologically or empirically are always more peaceful and proponents of peace over conflict. To the contrary, women have been shown to choose conflict over peace and be equally as violent as their male counterparts in a variety of studies (Bjarnegård & Melander, 2013; Cohen, 2013; Cunningham, 2003). However, peace processes tend to be more successful when women and gender equality are incorporated in the effort than when these two elements are absent.

2 That is to say, increasing the number of women included to provide gender equity in representation.

3 That is to say, incorporating policies that provide gender equity.

4 For example, UNSCR 1325.

5 The absence of this biographical information is intentional and one the creators of the database are hesitant to include because of epistemological challenges in declaring a peace treaty as “ended.” Per the authors, there are a variety of ways for a treaty to end, including never really being implemented to begin with, simply being abandoned, or ending due to the resumption of conflict. For the sake of my study, I am not concerned with these nuanced details and am concerned with whether the treaty ceased, if at all. To overcome the problem of missing possible end dates, I use the Conflict ID of observations to merge the dataset with the UCDP data set.

6 If a treaty does not fall back into conflict, it takes the artificial end date of March 15, 2021.

7 This entails the inclusion of nonnumeric commitments to have women’s representation, requirements to address gender participation or equality in political institutions, commitments to adequate representation, effective/equal participation, and so on.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anntiana Maral Sabeti

Anntiana Maral Sabeti is a PhD candidate at School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University. Her work lies in the intersection of women and peace.