I got the idea for my topic when my comparative politics class visited the Council on Foreign Relations, and the woman we spoke to claimed that peace agreements lasted fifteen years longer when women were part of the negotiations. Most superficially, I am pursuing this subject because I want to know how accurate that claim is, and also why it might be the case. However, my motivations go deeper. I attended an all-girls high school, consider myself a feminist, and believe that women are excluded from political processes because their presence threatens male power, so I really cannot claim to be completely unbiased or objective about my subject. However, I think that my feminist worldview drives a lot of my interest in my project, and pushes me to stay engaged and interested even when the research process becomes difficult or overwhelming. I also believe that empowering women, and actively working to include them in political processes— such as peacemaking— contributes to the overall prosperity of society. In other words, if there is even a chance that including women in peace process makes them durable, then we should do everything within our power to bring that about for the sake of all people. In that way, my research is grounded in a specific purpose; it is not simply for my personal elucidation. Last semester, I sheepishly told my mentor that I was doing the research because I wanted to make the world a better place, but that I felt like it was such a cliché reason to undertake such a project. He told me that he has always done his own research for the same reason, which I think is also my deepest motivation. My hope is that my final project can be a justification for the inclusion of women in peace processes.
In terms of methodological choices, I decided on small-N analysis instead of an interpretivist approach because I wanted there to be some generalizability, such that my final project is useful in explaining this phenomenon in other cases. It was impossible to do a large-N analysis because there are not sufficient cases of women’s inclusion in peace processes, and also because peacemaking is extraordinarily complex and not well reduced to a couple of variables. Finally, I chose process-tracing in particular to explain, as much as possible, how women’s inclusion can contribute to the durability of a peace process.
My research rests entirely on the normative assumption that peace is good and desirable, when it is entirely fair to point out that conflict benefits a select few, and the ending of conflict can mean the ending of the livelihoods of those involved in war making. However, I am a utilitarian at heart, and I believe the consequences of peace are preferable to the consequences of war, and am willing to accept that normative assumption.
SIS Olson Scholars