Peacemaking on the Margins: Toward an Inclusive Typology of Women’s Pathways to Peace

My dissertation and current book project explores how local conflict-affected women who have been historically marginalized from formal institutions exercise their agency from the bottom-up, often through informal pathways, to influence peace processes and outcomes. It makes a novel contribution to the international security scholarship by developing a re-imagined and locally defined typology of the different pathways through which women, who have been historically marginalized from formal peace processes, exercise their power to achieve peace. It also provides an examination of conflict-affected women’s understanding of what peace and peace outcomes are, along with the factors that women perceive as helping or hurting their efforts to make peace—both of which are largely absent in the peace and conflict scholarship. I argue that while women may be active in trying to access and influence third party-led formal peace processes, they often perceive their power in peace processes as primarily coming from informal pathways, such as the activation of pre-existing informal social networks or the formation of new informal social movements, which may or may not be connected to a formal process. The theory section of my dissertation has already been published as single-author book chapter entitled “Peacemaking from the peripheries. Lessons from the women of Sudan on informal pathways to peace.”

Supported by a $20,000 research grant from the University of California, Irvine’s Glasser Center for the Power of Music and Social Change, I have conducted extensive field research and assembled an original qualitative dataset of more than 150 interviews and stories from conflict-affected women across Sudan, South Sudan, and Nigeria. I conducted field research trips to both Northern Uganda—where I collaborated with South Sudanese refugee communities—and to Nigeria, where I worked with local civil society and women’s groups in Port Harcourt. I also worked remotely with a community-based organization in Yei, South Sudan, to support local research assistants in collecting in-person interviews and stories from local women. In Sudan, I relied on pre-existing relationships with women’s and diaspora groups to connect with conflict-affected women remotely. My methods relied on interpretive interviews, story collection, and narrative analysis, along with abductive qualitative coding, to capture women’s perceptions and lived experiences as close to their original meanings as possible. The final dataset is expected to include nearly 200 individual interviews and stories.

This project makes several important scholarly contributions to existing scholarship in peace and conflict studies. First, it challenges security scholars’ conceptualization of peace processes–one that has been too narrowly focused on participants working through top-down formal processes facilitated by third-party actors. My dissertation reverses the direction of analysis and provides a typology of the different pathways through which women may perceive themselves as having power to influence peace processes, not all of which may seek to access formal power or institutions. Second, my dissertation problematizes the power of women on the periphery within these peace processes, offering a novel explanation of how they view their power. In doing so, my research centers a historically marginalized population within the scholarship. Third, my dissertation fills a gap in a growing body of literature in critical, feminist, and international conflict scholarship on bottom-up peace formation processes by interrogating what factors women perceive as having an impact on their influence within them.

Gendered Hierarchies, Local Agency, and Armed Conflict

In another ongoing line of research, my work seeks to understand how gendered hierarchies and systems of power interact with local agency to influence the occurrence and duration of conflict, often operating through formal institutions such as International Financial Institutions and third-party peace processes. I have published two single-author peer reviewed articles related to this line of research. Most recently, I published an article in the Review of International Political Economy on how international financial institutions perpetuate gendered circuits of violence within peacemaking interventions. Within the last year I have also published an article in Third World Quarterly on how the gendered consequences of extractive economic activities have impacted the occurrence of conflict in Sudan.

I have two follow-on projects planned that will contribute to the peace and conflict scholarship on how third-party interventions shape inclusivity and sustainability in peace processes. First, I am developing a book project that asks how the myriad international interventions in 21^st century Sudan—to include political, economic, and peace interventions—have shaped gendered outcomes and conflict. This project will bring my dissertation project into conversation with my recent journal articles to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay between international interventions, local agency, gender, and conflict within the understudied and contemporarily relevant case of Sudan. Second, I plan to conduct a series of studies that will more deeply interrogate how different forms of international interventions—to include political, economic, development, and peace interventions—shape women’s agency and influence within both formal and informal peace processes. This research will entail a multi-methods approach, including both in-depth field research on specific case studies and new and existing survey data across a larger set of conflict-affected settings. Together these projects will provide a missing perspective within the scholarship on how women’s agency and influence within conflict-affected settings is influenced, positively or negatively, by different types of international interventions, while also elevating the lived experiences of a historically marginalized community within international peace and security literature.