| This is a comparative project on the participation of high-level women negotiators in the conflict resolution processes in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Chiapas, Mexico. I compare how women become negotiators; what issues they raise at the table; and how (if at all) the final peace accords address women's rights and concerns. For this research, I conducted open-ended interviews with many of the negotiators in these cases, as well as government, former guerrilla, and civil society actors, in addition to utilizing archival and secondary sources. For conceptual clarity, I brought to bear research on women's political representation, and explored the current challenges in existing conflict resolution literature on gender. My findings indicate that a range of factors impact women's participation in negotiations, including whether the goals of the talks are minimalist or maximalist, and the path by which the women joined their negotiation teams. In terms of policy, international norms and processes can have more impact on these negotiations, and on the content of the accords, than the gender identity of individual negotiators. Finally, my findings indicate that negotiators often act as political actors, who are committed to and conscribed by their negotiation team's policy platform. This provides an alternative to seeing a negotiator's gender as the primary and overriding variable in issues they raise in a peace process. Ultimately, this project challenges the assumptions of causality that have underpinned current thinking about women in conflict resolution. Expecting women to address only one set of issues with only one perspective reduces women's scope to participate fully in negotiations, effectively limiting their agency rather than amplifying it. As demonstrated throughout the case studies in this dissertation, women's participation in peace processes should be paired with broader, structural efforts to ensure women's rights are embedded in the outcomes of these processes. |
