Abstract
Recent research has directed attention to the transformative potential of war for female empowerment. As a disruptive shock, armed conflict can create a window of opportunity for advancing the societal role of women. We complement this research agenda by looking at how conflict severity and termination condition the outcomes for women in the aftermath of civil conflict. We expect that both level of violence and mode of resolution affect subsequent female empowerment, where severe conflicts ending by a negotiated settlement have the greatest transformative potential. Consistent with expectations, we find that post-conflict improvements in female empowerment occur primarily after high-intensity civil conflicts. However, subsequent tests reveal that this effect is driven largely by conflicts terminated by peace agreements. The greatest improvement in female empowerment is seen when peace agreements have gender-specific provisions. These results support calls for a sustained effort toward mainstreaming gender issues in conflict resolution and peacebuilding processes.
Highlights
Women’s status and political influence worldwide has improved substantially over the past decades, both in relative and absolute terms
We find that the positive effect of peace agreements reported in Model 4 is attributable primarily to those agreements that explicitly address women; the estimated effect for PA ending w/ gender is five times greater than that for PA ending w/o gender, even though the large standard error around the latter point estimate implies overlap in 95% confidence intervals
Subsequent models revealed that the conflict severity effect works mostly through increasing the likelihood of negotiated settlements. Those that contain gender-specific provisions, have a pronounced positive impact on post-conflict female empowerment whereas conflicts that end in other ways show little general tendency to catch up on what’s lost in terms of gender equity during war
Summary
Women’s status and political influence worldwide has improved substantially over the past decades, both in relative and absolute terms. Progress is observed in girls’ educational attainment, with gender parity in primary education being achieved in most countries (United Nations 2015). Gender gaps are still persistent in most countries (UN Women 2016; World Economic Forum 2017).. Gender gaps are still persistent in most countries (UN Women 2016; World Economic Forum 2017).1 These gaps are extensive in non-democratic countries with low socio-economic development. Some of the worstperforming countries in terms of gender gaps in education, work force, and political participation are countries with durable civil war and fragile governance, such as Yemen, Chad, Syria, and Mali (World Economic Forum 2017). As Melander (2016, 197) puts it, “The strongest pattern in civil war is probably its gendered nature.”
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