Description
This paper investigates how women’s groups resist post-conflict marginalisation and reshape governance in post-conflict contexts. Using a feminist institutionalism approach, we conceptualise women’s agency as both gendered resistance and institution-building. This dual lens allows us to capture how women challenge exclusionary power structures and actively participate in creating new institutional norms, practices and alliances. Our analysis focuses on two networks of women’s organisations, Balai Syura Ereung Inong Aceh and Rede Feto Timor-Leste, in Aceh and Timor-Leste, respectively. These cases illustrate how women’s groups navigate complex political landscapes in the aftermath of conflict. The paper argues that women are not peripheral actors in post-conflict reconstruction but central agents in shaping the emerging political order. Drawing on archival research, field observations, and interviews with women activists, male politicians, international actors, and religious leaders, our analysis reveals how women’s collective action in post-conflict contexts operates simultaneously within and against dominant institutional arrangements. We show that the agendas and strategies of women’s groups are contingent on multiple intersecting factors, including the gendered legacies of conflict, the influence of international actors, resistance from male elites to women’s rights discourses, and the enduring power of informal institutions such as customary and religious norms.
