Despite the global progress made in achieving gender equality, many still tend to view armed conflicts as a male-dominated sphere. However, the reality is that women often play crucial roles in such contexts, whether through combat, non-combat, or leadership positions. Yet, they are routinely marginalized in formal peace processes and post-conflict governance rebuilding, a pattern that reflects both a moral and practical failure.
During armed conflicts, women become more susceptible to genocide, human trafficking, slavery, and sexual violence, which come with health risks and psychological trauma. This alone qualifies them for participation in peace processes. Yet, women are not merely passive victims of conflict: as seen in Ukraine, they significantly contribute during war, whether on battlefields, within civil society, or as advocates for peace.
In this context, women’s agency and decision-making abilities tend to increase during periods of conflict, despite the risks they face. However, when they are later excluded from peace negotiations and subsequent processes—as has been the case in Ukraine so far—these gains are reversed, and traditional gender norms are reinstated, particularly in countries with more entrenched patriarchal structures.
Legal frameworks promoting women’s involvement in conflict resolution and post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction have failed to achieve real transformation, partly due to implementation and operational challenges. For example, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, adopted in 2000, calls for all parties to enhance women’s participation and integrate a gender perspective into all UN efforts in the areas of peace and security. Yet, by 2018, there was no significant rise in the number of women signing peace agreements.
This has important implications for the content and outcomes of peace agreements. In a recent study, my colleagues Matthew Clancey, Romuald Mingo, Charles van der Schoor, and I used natural language processing to analyze the use of gendered language (such as words like “man,” “girl,” “boy,” “she,” “he,” “female,” “male,” “wife,” “daughter”) in peace agreements from 1990 to 2023. We created a “Gender Bias Index” ranging from -0.6 to 0.6, where lower values indicate less use of gendered language and thus less focus on gender-sensitive outcomes.
None of the agreements studied exhibited particularly strong indicators of gender bias, and even those that employed more gendered language—which reflects a relative positive bias toward women—did not necessarily correlate with substantive improvements in women’s ability to influence outcomes. In other words, even frameworks that acknowledge gender inequality have not yielded significant change.
The issue lies in the fact that references to gender have not been accompanied by concrete requirements, along with monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. For instance, a peace agreement may call for increased political participation of women without setting binding targets, leading to negligible results. This approach can be detrimental to gender equality, as it creates an illusion of real progress while nothing tangible occurs.
Moreover, other studies have shown that components of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) in peace agreements rarely address women, undermining the rehabilitation of female combatants, who may be excluded from programs tailored for their male counterparts.
Evidence shows that involving women in conflict resolution and peacebuilding processes leads to better outcomes for all. Analyses from 2018 indicated a “strong correlation” between the participation of women as signatories to peace agreements and the sustainability of the resulting peace. Furthermore, agreements signed by women typically include more provisions focused on political reform and achieve higher implementation rates for those provisions.
In El Salvador, the agreement signed in 1992—ending a 12-year civil war—provided disarmament and reintegration benefits for female combatants and included non-combatant women from the opposition movement in reintegration programs. Women later played a pivotal role in stabilization processes and contributed to reconstruction efforts. Communities that received systematic and ongoing support made more significant progress in gender equality and overall development.
Similarly, in Liberia, women participated in the negotiations that ended over a decade of civil war in the early 2000s, resulting in a significant increase in female political representation, culminating in Ellen Johnson Sirleaf becoming the first woman elected as president of a country in Africa in 2005.
The message is clear: women must be involved in all aspects of peace processes, from the design and negotiation to the signing of agreements and the implementation of stabilization and post-conflict reconstruction plans. They should have access to all relevant support programs, such as those related to DDR and initiatives that address gender-specific needs.
More broadly, peace processes must explicitly recognize and enhance women’s decision-making capacity. This does not merely mean emphasizing the importance of women with vague language that dilutes responsibility; rather, supporting women’s capacity to make peace and build a post-conflict future requires concrete, actionable measures to ensure their rights and expand their participation in all areas of decision-making.
