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.
Julia — this is certainly an important article for your research (particularly for providing background information), but it is not from a scholarly peer-reviewed journal (Foreign Policy is more of a magazine). Remember that we want scholarly, peer-reviewed literature for our literature review, not lease because those in-depth research pieces will provide us with extensive information on relevant theories, potential variables/hypotheses to test (in neopositivist work), and/or categories of meaning and identities to investigate (in interpretivist work). The information in this FP article is valuable for helping to frame your puzzle, but keep working on finding the scholarly peer-reviewed sources for your literature review!