Category: Research

I met with my mentor, Professor Wanis-St. John, for the last time this semester on December 6, 2017, for about half an hour. We tried to meet every other week over the course of the semester, generally for about a half hour to an hour each time, but because of mutual scheduling difficulties it ended up being about every three weeks. However, we still managed to meet about 5 or 6 times, and his suggestions, advice, and questions were always incredibly helpful in shaping how I thought about my project and the decisions I ended up making. For the last minute, we mostly discussed my next steps. Both of us agreed that I would go forward with a small-n case study, using Mill’s Method of Agreement. Professor Wanis-St. John approved my cases, the Dayton Accords and the Good Friday Agreement, and also helped me clarify my justification for them, which is something I struggled with in the research design sketch. The Good Friday Agreement was fairly inclusive, while the Dayton Accords were not, which supports the comparative aspect of my choice of methodology. Furthermore, they are similar in scope- both are European agreements from around the same time, and both of them had failed during previous attempts at peacemaking. As I go forward with my final narrative paper, I will also go through the course readings in more depth to substantiate my justification for choosing these cases. Professor Wanis-St. John also approved my variables, and suggested I include international support and the use of NATO/military leverage as intervening variables as well. Finally, he suggested over the break I look for two books published by the main negotiators for both of my cases, George Mitchell for the Good Friday Agreement and Richard Holbrooke for the Dayton Accords, to use as starting points for the research I will do in 306.
We touched briefly on the progress I’ve made this semester with this research project. I started out really having no idea what kind of methodology I would choose. I only had previous experience with large-n statistical analysis, but I knew that wasn’t something I really wanted to do again, and that I didn’t think would work very well for my topic because there have been so few cases of women’s inclusion in peace processes. It’s been wonderful experience this semester to be able to come to my mentor with all of these questions about what I was finding, and what was important versus what was just interesting. We both felt pretty early on that a small-n case study would most effectively answer my puzzle of how much women’s inclusion matters, and while our conversations were steered in that direction, he also very gamely helped me with my other research designs. I don’t have really any questions about 306, but I am looking forward to finally really getting the whole process started next semester.

One of the more exciting parts of interpretivist research is how deeply focused one can get into the ins and outs of a specific discourse. I would like to look at the way UN Security Council Resolutions on women, peace and security discuss women and how peace processes should deal with women and women’s issues. In particular, I the discourses I would like to focus on cover whether or not the resolutions are characterizing women as victims only or agents of peacemaking, how the role of sexual assault in conflict should be handled in peace agreements, and the types of ways that women can be included in processes. The resolutions I would like to begin with are 1325 (2000), 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009), 1889 (2009), 1960 (2010), 2106 (2013), 2122 (2013), and 2242 (2015).1
The representations of women in the resolutions are particularly important, because they have the potential to affect very deeply global norms about the participation and inclusion of women both in peace processes, and in post-conflict societies. Furthermore, how violence against women, particularly sexual violence, is dealt with by the resolutions has influence over how it is dealt with in peace agreements. The resolutions assist in the construction of international norms about women, and help construct the identities and roles of women in post-conflict societies.
The UN Security Council Resolutions are just a start, because the research question I’m edging towards for this sketch deals with the relationship between the work of the Security Council and the dialogue about women in peace agreements, possibly how do the UNSC Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security influence peace agreements? I would likely pick a specific agreement to analyze for this question, most likely one that has several of these discourses prominently featured.

1. UN Security Council, Res. S/RES/1325/2000, 31 October 2000.
UN Security Council, Res. S/RES/1820/2008, 19 June 2008.
UN Security Council, Res. S/RES/1888/2009, 30 September 2009.
UN Security Council, Res. S/RES/1889/2009, 5 October 2009.
UN Security Council, Res. S/RES/1960/2010, 16 December 2010.
UN Security Council, Res. S/RES/2106/2013, 24 June 2013.
UN Security Council, Res. S/RES/2122/2013, 18 October 2013.
UN Security Council, Res. S/RES/2242/2015, 13 October 2015.

For a small-n research project my research question would have to change once again, this time to, on a general scale, what explains the success or failure of peace processes? More specifically, how does the inclusion of women influence the durability of peace processes? My dependent variable is the success or failure of peace agreements, which the literature usually measures in years; five years is typically the marker used to define the success of a peace agreement, but that is a simpler measurement of my dependent variable than I would like to use.1 After speaking with my mentor, I would like to include, with the durability of a peace agreement, the degree to which its implementation is successful as the measures of success or failure. My mentor pointed me to a database of peace accords, the Peace Accord Matrix, which tracks over 50 peace agreements and includes detailed information on factors that are significant to the durability of an agreement, and gives implementation scores based on how well the agreement is holding up.2
In terms of operationalizing my dependent variable, at the moment it has a couple of different parts. First of all, I can use the length of time the agreement has lasted as a basic measure of its success or failure.3 Secondly, to measure implementation, I will look at what types of enforcement, constitution building, and other parts of the agreement were included in the accord, and then track whether each part was actually implemented using the Peace Accord Matrix. At this point in time I do not have cases selected, but my mentor suggested arbitrarily picking a case in Europe, Africa, and Latin America while I focus on the question and variables to check how feasible and substantial my data is. Therefore, at the moment I’m using the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement, the Accra Peace Agreement, and the Chapultepec Peace Agreement.4 The Good Friday Agreement has an implementation score of 95%, the Accra Peace Agreement a score of 88%, and the Chapultepec Peace Agreement a 96%, all after 10 years of their implementation.5

1.Suzanne Ghais, “Inclusivity and Peacemaking in Internal Armed Conflicts” (Ph.D., American University, 2016), 3.
2.“Peace Accords Matrix,” Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, last modified 2015, accessed November 8, 2017, https://peaceaccords.nd.edu/.
3. Ghais, 3.
4. “Peace Accords Matrix.”
5. Ibid.

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.

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.