Description
Quantitative analyses of women’s participation in peace negotiations consistently show that women are often associated with gender equality, and social provisions, while their engagement in militarized or politicized aspects of peace processes remains rare, or at least rarely discussed. This paper focuses on exceptional cases that diverge from this dominant pattern, seeking to understand the conditions under which women negotiators are able to move beyond stereotypically feminized issue areas. Drawing on two outlier cases, Northern Ireland and the Philippines, where women were directly involved in shaping security, power-sharing, and military provisions, the study employs qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews and process tracing, to investigate the mechanisms that enable such agency. The analysis is framed by feminist institutionalism and the concept of agency, exploring how institutional contexts, informal norms, and strategic action intersect to create openings for women’s influence in masculinized negotiation spaces. By situating these cases within broader theoretical debates on gender and institutional change, the paper demonstrates how women negotiators navigate, resist, and sometimes transform gendered constraints within peace processes. The findings contribute to feminist peace and conflict research by highlighting the conditions that allow women to engage substantively in “hard security” issues, offering a more nuanced understanding of both gendered agency and institutional flexibility in post-conflict negotiations.
