Month: October 2017

My research question as it stands—what explains the lack of women in peace processes—does not fit very well with large-n statistical research because there are very few cases where women are present or included in any form in the peace process.1 To address this problem, I visited Clement Ho, the research librarian available to the program, and we talked about how different questions work for different types of research, and that sometimes it is necessary to change the question to fit the methodology. Consequently, for this methodology sketch, my question is changing to “How is the role of women in politics affected by the presence of a UN Peacekeeping force in the resolution of a conflict?” The indicator I will use for my dependent variable, the role of women, will be the number of women elected to parliaments. I found a fantastic dataset for this variable through the American University library website that catalogues the number of women elected to national parliaments in over 150 countries beginning 20 years ago in 1997.2 Clement also suggested a dataset that lists and provides detailed information on UN Peacekeeping missions, organized by region and dating from 1948 to the present.3 One of the obvious limitations of the of the women in parliaments dataset is the time range—because it is limited to 20 years, the peacekeeping missions would also have to be within the 20 years, or it would not be possible to measure their affect. Conversely, the issue could also be the Peacekeeping missions. Because they have such a large range over time, there are not enough cases within the 20-year range to do a valid statistical analysis. Consequently, my independent variable would need to change to accommodate that range and still have enough cases to test.

1.Sarah Taylor, “A Better Peace? Including Women in Conflict Negotiations” (PhD diss. The New School, 2015), 3.
2.“Women in National Parliaments,” accessed October 25, 2017, http://archive.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm.
3.United Nations, “United Nations Peacekeeping,” accessed October 25 2017, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/current.shtml.

Transforming the Institutions of Peacemaking

There are two main divisions in my topic of women in peace and security, which are the literature on peacebuilding and security, and the literature on the international status of women. Terrence Lyons and Torunn Tryggestad bring together those two topics.
Lyons’ chapter in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding titled “Peacebuilding, Democratization, and Transforming the Institutions of War” posits that demilitarizing politics can foster more sustainable peacebuilding.1 He works primarily within the schools of thought that focus on the politics of peace implementation, dealing specifically with post-peace agreement settlement issues.2 His main argument is that peace processes are most effective when demilitarized, and his main points of emphasis are the role that interim administrations can play, the importance of transforming militias into political parties, and the need to demobilize military groups.3
Tryggestad, in her article “Trick or Treat? The UN and Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security,” describes the significance of UNSC Resolution 1325 and the various forces that came together to make it happen.4 The schools of thought she references are international security and the international feminist movement. Her main considerations cover the difficulties inherent to successfully implementing UNSC Resolution 1325 and the status of it in 2009.5 She explains the significance of UNSC Resolution 1325 as “it’s acknowledgment of women’s agency in relation to peace and security matters.”6
The overlap between Lyon’s and Tryggestad’s work is where they become relevant to my research, as I’m investigating the role that women have and can have in peace processes. Tryggestad’s article assesses the general understanding of the international community on women in peace processes, and the efforts that the UN has made in addressing the limited role women currently play in peace and security, while Lyon’s chapter describes a specific way that peace processes can be made more sustainable. Both pieces call for a change in the current methods of peacebuilding.
My research will add to the conversation either by finding the role that women can play in the types of peacebuilding Lyons describes, or by taking the practical implications of Lyon’s work and finding how they can be incorporated into the efforts of the UN to include women in the area of peace and security.

1. Terrence Lyons. “Peacebuilding, Democratization, and Transforming the Institutions of War” in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding. Editors Louis Kriesberg and Bruce W.Dayton, New York (Routledge, 2009), 92.
2.Ibid, 91-92.
3.Ibid, 91-106.
4.Torunn, Tryggestad. “Trick or Treat? The UN and Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security.” Global Governance 15, (2009), 540.
5.Ibid, 541-542.
6.Ibid, 539-557.
7.Ibid, 540.