Description
Women Peace and Security scholars and activists have long championed women’s inclusion in peace negotiations given the political opportunity these processes present marginalized groups. Within this advocacy, there is an expectation that women can exert significant influence on negotiations and this influence is narrowly conceptualized as the number of gender-specific provisions in a final agreement. However, there has been little consideration of the power dynamics inherent to the deeply militarized and masculinized space of peace negotiations. Therefore, this paper asks: what types of leverage and power do women’s activists possess in formal peace negotiations? I explore this question through examination of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC) in the 1996-1998 Good Friday Agreement negotiations. Drawing from archival documents and 42 elite interviews with NIWC negotiators and British and Irish Government officials integral to the conduct of the negotiations, I find that as a low-status party, the NIWC did not have the coercive power to make explicit demands and insist on particular provisions. However, they built substantial soft power through a problem-solving approach in which they developed relational, informational, moral, and procedural forms of power. This approach not only strengthened their bargaining power, but moved the talks through key moments of intransigence. These findings problematize the common characterization that all actors enjoy equal influence in peace negotiations and highlight the strategic political agency of women’s activists whose contributions include, but extend far beyond, a simple tally of gender provisions.
