Month: September 2017

The next step in my research is to narrow in a guiding question. To follow Booth’s three part formulation, I am proposing to research the role of women in conflict resolution because I want to find out why the international community struggles to include women in peace processes, to help my reader understand how to reduce global conflict and foster sustainable peacemaking.1 The literature on women in peace and security, and the field of inclusive security in general, has well established that including women in conflict resolution generally results in more durable peace agreements, but there is a marked lack of women actually included in the higher level roles in negotiations.2 An article published in International Negotiation by my mentor, Anthony Wanis-St. John, supports the main premise of inclusive security. Wanis-St. John and Darren Kew argue that the inclusion of the civil society of a country in peace processes strengthens the durability of rebuilding the country.3 Their research focused on a range of peace agreements from the preceding fifteen years, and searched for correlations between the involvement of civil society in peace negotiations and the “durability of peace negotiations thereafter.”4 They categorized different peace outcomes as sustained peace, cold peace, and the resumption of war, and found that there was a strong correlation between the inclusion of civil society in the negotiations and an outcome of sustained peace.5 While Wanis-St. John and Kew focused on the civil society aspect of inclusive security and I am focusing on the inclusion of women, many of the benefits—and results—they identify are the same.
The concept of inclusive security is not new to the international community. In 2000, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1325, which addresses the unique role that women play in peace and security as both victims of conflict and agents in peace processes.6 Resolution 1325 particularly stressed “the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security, and the need to increase their role in decision-making with regard to conflict prevention and resolution,” marking the first time the United Nations recognized the complexity of the female experience of global conflict.7 Resolution 1325 was a landmark resolution, but its success is a controversy that is continually debated. In her article “Trick or Treat? The UN and Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security” Torunn Tryggestad argues that internal processes in the United Nations continue to shape “the actual implementation of Resolution 1325.”8 She acknowledges that the adoption of the resolution broke a major barrier in the role of women in peace and security by shifting women into the ‘hard security sphere,’ many members of the international community treat it as merely a set of guidelines rather than international law, and she questions the effectiveness of its implementation and whether or not it has achieved its initial goals.9
Tryggestad’s analysis of Resolution 1325 is supported by a discussion conducted by email and facilitated by Carol Cohn, Helen Kinsella, and Sheri Gibbings between three other women—Felicity Hill, Maka Muna, and Isha Dylan—who were involved in the advocacy and lobbying effort to get 1325 passed. Hill and Muna described the primary goal of Resolution 1325 as making “gender a routinely considered component in the full range of work undertaken by the Security Council… to shift the focus from women as victims (without losing this aspect of conflict) to women as effective actors in peace and peace building.”10 The women come to a consensus that implementing something as revolutionary as Resolution 1325 is very difficult for such “a large, complex, and over-tasked” organization, bringing into question the ability of Resolution 1325 to actually achieve its goals.11
The United Nations is the primary forum for peace and conflict resolution in the world, and the example it sets in inclusive security is undeniably important to encouraging sustainable peacemaking. The 20th and 21st centuries have arguably seen more global conflict than any other time period, making the need for peace solutions that last even more pressing. However, there is a dearth of women in peace and security. While the UN is working to address that issue, the international community is slow to respond. In that light, I am proposing two research questions. The first is “What explains the lack of women in peace processes in the context of the UN’s work on fostering inclusive security?” The second is “How has Resolution 1325 in particular been successful in promoting the inclusion of women in peace negotiations?” Both questions explore issues that could help shed light on the struggles of the international community with inclusive security.

1. Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research, (3rd ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, 45-48.
2. Torunn L. Tryggestad, “Trick or Treat? The UN and Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security,” Global Governance 15, no. 4 (2009), 545.
3. Anthony Wanis-St. John, “Peace Processes, Secret Negotiations and Civil Society: Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion,” International Negotiation 13, no. 1 (2008), 13.
4. Ibid, 13.
5. Ibid, 25-28.
6. UN Security Council, Res. S/RES/1325/2000, 31 October 2000.
7. Ibid, 1.
8. Tryggestad, 540.
9. Ibid, 541, 544.
10. Carol Cohn, Helen Kinsella, and Sheri Gibbings, “Women, Peace and Security Resolution 1325,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6, no. 1 (2004), 131-132.
11. Ibid, 134.

The article “Women Waging Peace” by Swanee Hunt (former U.S. Ambassador to Austria) and Cristina Posa (former judicial clerk at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia), published in the journal Foreign Policy, investigates the question of how the world community can support “the creation of sustainable peace by fostering fundamental societal changes.”1 More specifically, Hunt and Posa evaluate how women fit into conflict resolution and some of the obstacles to including more women in peace negotiations. They argue essentially that the specific societal roles of women could greatly improve the depth and durability of peace deals and treaties. For example, the unique area women fill between the military and the government and the local situation is one that is essential to successful peace processes and also one that international organizations struggle to reach.2 Furthermore, their separation (generally) from the actual war-making makes them the logical choice to organize its opposite, peacemaking.3 Hunt and Posa take a positivist perspective towards their research, seeking universal benefits for the inclusion of women in all security processes, and analyze how women fit into the concept of inclusive security—defined as “a diverse, citizen-driven approach to global security”—through the examples of several different cases of women’s participation in negotiations.4 They use primarily qualitative data from other scholarly articles and especially from newspapers and other forms of popular media.

1. Swanee Hunt and Cristina Posa. “Women Waging Peace,” Foreign Policy, no. 124, (2001), 38.
2. Hunt and Posa, 43.
3. Hunt and Posa, 41.
4. Hunt and Posa, 38.

Contemporary academic research rests on several philosophical wagers, beginning with the concept of ontology, or the question of what kind of knowledge is out there to know. When we discussed the debates between objectivism and constructionism, or what Andrew Abbott calls realism and constructionism, I approached them feeling entirely certain of my beliefs about how knowledge should be understood. Once we started pulling apart objectivism and constructivism, (Andrew Abbott. Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences, first edition. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 46.) I realized that I recognized aspects of both debates to be valuable and valid, which was challenging because the debates are mutually exclusive. While I agreed with the objectivist or realist position that there are transcendental or universal aspects of society, I also strongly identified with the constructivist position that we as researchers cannot separate ourselves form the world we are researching. The discussion over methodology was less challenging to me, because even though the choice of methodology rests on these primary ontological debates, the choice of methodology is relevant to the type of knowledge one is seeking in research and does not influence the internal validity of the project itself. I think my struggle with the ontological debates comes from wanting a single perspective on how I should conceptualize the world, and that the best way for me to grow as a researcher is to open myself to the prospect of holding multiple and conflicting views towards conceptualizing knowledge at the same time rather than being beholden to one side.
That being said, I would say I tend towards the constructivist or interpretivist side more than the objectivist or positivist perspective. Abbott describes the interpretive perspective as holding that “events that seem to be measurable in fact acquire meaning only when it is assigned to them in interaction” (Abbott, 43), which I feel more comfortable with than the idea of universal and constant meaning in social life. However, I also fully accept that there are underlying tensions intrinsic to social life that are present in all societies. I think that we cannot entirely separate ourselves from our research in social life because we as humans are inherently part of social life, and therefore there is no such thing as truly objective research. For my own project, regardless of the methodology I choose, this means a deep examination of my own influence and perspective on the knowledge I discover.
The type of knowledge I believe I can uncover is not necessarily things I can only observe with my eyes, but also things that are deeper within societal structures. In particular, I want to discover both the surface-level aspects of conflict resolution and security that involve women—such as how many women are present at the negotiating table, how long peace treaties last, and the issues central to conflict—and the vaguer undercurrents involved with the female experience of security and conflict resolution, like what are the psychological, social, cultural, and physical obstacles to inclusive security.

I first became interested in the role that women play in global peace and security when my Comparative Politics class last year visited the Council on Foreign Relations and spoke to a member of their research team who focused on women in international politics. She told my class a fascinating statistic that stuck in my mind—that peace deals and treaties tended to last about 15 years longer when women were present at the negotiating table, and yet women are still rarely welcome at the negotiations. The brief explanation she had for this included a story of one treaty in Africa where the men of two different villages were negotiating a deal, but the negotiations had stalled. Finally, the women of the villages stepped in and resolved a lot of the issues simply because of their knowledge of the land; rights were being contested to a river that ran through both villages, but the women reported it had dried up and was of no use to anyone, so why were all the men fighting over it. The men had not spent much time in the villages—and consequently did not know about the river—because they had been occupied with fighting each other. This theme, of traditional gender roles blocking both smoother negotiations and women from the negotiating table, came up frequently in my initial research, but it is not the whole picture or reason for why women are often excluded from negotiations. My project is focusing on both why having women present extends the life of the treaties and why it is so difficult to get women to the table in the first place. The exigency of my project stems from the desperate need so many communities across the world feel for peace and political stability, and if having women present at negotiations lengthens the time that communities experience peace, understanding the factors behind that statistic is the first step to getting more women involved in peace and security.

The first major puzzle that has come up in my research is the way the global community thinks about women in peace and security. Before 2000 and the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, women were considered as victims only of violence and political instability. However, Resolution 1325 recognized that women, while still victims, also have incredible agency in peace and security, and a lot that only the experience of being female can offer. Resolution 1325 was a huge stepping point in the UN’s understanding of women’s issues, and has shaped subsequent resolutions in multiple UN bodies. However, 1325 is still a controversial resolution—a debate rages over whether it has achieved any actual change, if it can achieve any actual change, and even between professionals and academics over whether or not discussing it in academic settings prevents it from realizing its full potential. Regardless, the puzzle of 1325 will play a very prominent role in my upcoming research.