Text and Context: Evaluating Peace Agreements for their 'Gender Perspective'
Abstract
The report examines first of all what ‘a gender perspective’ in peace agreements might mean, suggesting that the term has not been fully enough considered. It also produces data on when women have been specifically mentioned in peace agreements, between 1 January 1990 and 1 January 2015. The data highlights that Peace agreement references to women have increased over time, apparently partly under the influence of UN Security Council Resolutions on women, peace and security. The increases have been greater in processes in which the UN was a signatory or declaratory to the peace agreements. However, often agreements with the most ‘holistic’ references to women are often highly internationalised agreements in which there is little real ‘agreement’ between the parties to the conflict, and where as a result there is a chronic implementation failure, both of the agreement and of its women provisions. Nonetheless some examples of good practice do exist. For example, substantive measures on equality for women and sexual violence have improved over time.
The full report, and an executive summary, are both available for download.
Citation
Bell, C. Text and Context: Evaluating Peace Agreements for their ‘Gender Perspective’. Political Settlements Research Programme (PSRP), Edinburgh, UK (2015) 6 pp. [Report 1]