Women Negotiators at the Peace Table: The Role of Gender Identity in Peacemaking

Gender-blind analyses of peace tables show that many factors, such as the characteristics of the negotiators, power relations between the parties, issues to be negotiated, and social and political context within which negotiations take place, affect negotiators’ perceptions of the process (how negotiations proceed) and the outcome (peace agreements) of peace negotiations (Guelke 2003; Bercovitch and Jackson 2009; Meerts 2020). However, we know very little about how women negotiators perceive the role of their gender identity in their peacemaking practices, whether and how the peace table (re)constructs or helps them perform their identity as ‘women peacemakers’, the difficulties they encounter due to their identity, and how they overcome them through strategies they develop as they construct or perform their roles as women peacemakers. This article studies 20 women negotiators in official peace negotiations from 14 different countries (15 conflict cases) using analyses of semi-structured interviews, public talks, reports, and secondary data from academic publications. Drawing on Waylen (2014), who presents peace negotiations as products of gendered power struggles and contestation, I argue that, while the presence of women negotiators increases inclusivity in peace processes, this presence remains locked into the perspective developed by international organizations and national representators that merely counts ‘women’ rather than developing a holistic, gendered view of peace, and mostly neglects the necessary fight for gender inequality and gendered peace. Similar to Mansbridge’s (1999) argument about women politicians, I show that, while women’s presence at peace tables is essential for their descriptive representation, this representation is contextual in that its outcomes are shaped by the intersections between gender identity and other identities, such as political ideology, age, and race, affect women negotiators’ understanding of their complex role at the peace table.