Research Portfolio Post #5

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.