Violence, Representation, and Legislative Outcomes: Feminist Politics in Post-Peace Agreement Colombia (2016-2026)

This paper examines legislative outcomes on violence against women and girls (VAWG) in Colombia during the post-peace agreement period. Despite growing political attention to VAWG since the signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement, legislative initiatives addressing gender-based violence have followed divergent trajectories: while some bills have been enacted into law, others have been rejected during debates or stalled and ultimately been archived. This paper asks what explains these different legislative outcomes. Drawing on an original dataset of 50 VAWG-related bills introduced in the Colombian Congress between 24 November 2016 and 20 July 2026, the study maps patterns of bill sponsorship, legislative progression, and policy outcomes. Building on feminist approaches to political representation, state feminism, and feminist institutionalism, the paper focuses on the role of critical actors within Congress and their alliances with feminist organisations and movements. Particular attention is paid to how gender, political ideology, and formal and informal institutional dynamics shape legislative trajectories. The paper combines systematic descriptive analysis of legislative initiatives with semi-structured interviews with legislators and representatives of feminist organisations and movements. It also incorporates an ongoing analysis of bill texts and congressional debates to examine how VAWG is framed within legislative processes and whether differences in framing, coalition-building, and movement–legislator collaboration help explain why some initiatives succeed while others fail. As a work-in-progress paper, the analysis primarily presents descriptive patterns from the legislative dataset alongside preliminary findings from interviews with legislators and feminist organisations. The ongoing thematic analysis of interview material and critical discourse analysis of legislative debates and bill texts will be used to further develop and refine these explanations in subsequent stages of the research. The paper contributes to ongoing debates on feminist policy change by examining the legislative politics of VAWG in a post-peace agreement context.