New Institutions, New Gender Rules? Emerging Evidence from the ESRC-DfID Political Settlements Research Programme

The Paper seeks to bring a feminist institutionalist lens to research on gendered peace settlements. It will draw on emerging evidence from the ESRC-DfID Political Settlements Research Programme, and the Women and Peace Agreements database (PAX-Women which lists all the peace agreements between 1990 and the present day which have provisions on women, gender or sexual violence) to address the trajectories of designing, establishing and implementing new – and more gender inclusive – institutions in time of transition. It will ask what an FI perspective, bringing together institutionalist theory and gendered analysis, and might offer to current peace settlement approaches, and to ongoing efforts to interrogate the gendered aspect of ‘political settlement’ as a category and a political process.