Abstract
AbstractScholars have pinpointed that women's underrepresentation in peacemaking results in gendered outcomes that do not address women's needs and interests. Despite recent increased representation at the negotiating table, women still have a limited influence on peacemaking outcomes. We propose that differences in female and male speeches reflected in the gendered patterns in discourse during peacemaking explain how women's influence is curtailed. We examine women's speaking behavior in transitional justice debates in the post-conflict Balkans. Applying multimethod quantitative text analysis to over half a million words in multiple languages, we analyze structural and thematic speech patterns. We find that men's domination of turn-taking and the absence of topics reflecting women's needs and interests lead to a gendered outcome. The sequences of men talking after men are longer than those of women talking after women, which restricts women's deliberative space and opportunities to develop and sustain arguments that reflect their concerns. We find no evidence that women's limited influence is driven by lower deliberative quality of their speeches. This study of gendered dynamics at the microlevel of discourse identifies a novel dimension of male domination during peacemaking.
Highlights
Peace is much more than the cessation of violence
The end of a conflict provides an opportunity to lay the foundations for gender-just peace, which transforms unequal gender relations providing for women’s political, social, and economic agency (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2013; Lake 2018)
Post-conflict peacemaking can introduce norms, structures, and power relations that disadvantage women. Some of these are an extension of gendered conflict dynamics, stemming from the different experience of violence by men and women (Melander 2016); others entail a reversal of women’s wartime gains in political and social agency (Tripp 2015; Berry 2018; Kreft 2019; Østby, Leiby, and Nordås 2019)
Summary
Peace is much more than the cessation of violence. Scrutiny of the quality of peace has revealed that peace often fails women (Wallensteen 2015, 45). To study women’s representation without influence and to test the proposed mechanisms to explain gendered outcomes, we focus on the RECOM process in the post-conflict Balkans Both scholars of political representation and transitional justice have found evidence that themes of contributions by men and women differ. Because of the consultative nature of the RECOM’s process, the organizers’ priority was to make debates diverse and inclusive along different identity axes (Bonora 2019, 145): men and women, people from all ethnic groups involved in the Balkan conflicts, from different constituencies (victims, veterans, human rights activists, and professionals, such as lawyers, journalists, and teachers), and different generations Their aim was to ensure a wide representation of different experiences of conflict and views on their appropriate redress by the regional commission, which would be codified in the draft Statute. As the original sessions were held in multiple languages (Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serbian, and Slovenian), the corpus was manually translated into Serbian. We applied a set of natural language processing tools developed for Balkan languages
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