In this seminar, Kevin McNicholl will discuss his research with Prof Christine Bell which gives a broad overview of when women, girls and gender are included in peace agreement provisions and aims to answer three over-arching questions. What factors correlate with inclusion? When women are mentioned in agreements, what is said about them? When there are provisions are they implemented?

The findings show references to women are heavily concentrated on later stages of peace processes and that earlier agreements such as ceasefires rarely contain provisions. Analysis of those ceasefires that do mention women contain extremely important provisions that should be replicated elsewhere. Surprisingly, power-sharing is shown to strongly correlate with increased inclusion, raising questions as to why this may be the case.

Further analysis shows that women tend to be discussed as victims first, and only occasionally as active participants in conflict or in the post-conflict peace. Finally, it is shown that there is an overall low level of implementation, but this is increased in power-sharing agreements.

Speaker Profile

Kevin is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Political Settlement Research Programme. This work involves the maintenance and analysis of the PA-X dataset, a new collection of over 1700 peace agreements from around the world between 1990 and 2018. His work looks at when women, girls and gender are mentioned in agreements, but also the role of power-sharing in inclusion. His previous work focused on Northern Ireland, national identity and attitudes towards Brexit and the border.