New CFR Interactive Report Explores Women’s Participation in Peace Processes

This post is co-authored by Anne Connell, assistant director of the Women and Foreign Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

New thinking on peace and security is needed. Nearly half of the conflict-resolution agreements forged during the 1990s failed within five years.  Recidivism for civil war is alarmingly high. And standard peace and security processes routinely overlook one strategy that could reduce conflict and advance stability around the world: the inclusion of women.  

Including women in peace efforts is not simply a matter of human rights—it is also a security imperative.  Women’s participation in peace negotiations makes the resulting agreement 64 percent less likely to fail and 35 percent more likely to last at least fifteen years. Analyses of conflicts around the world show that women make critical contributions to conflict prevention and early warning, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and post-conflict resolution. 

Despite evidence that peace is more likely when women have seats at the negotiating table, their representation has lagged. Our research finds that, between 1990 and 2017, women represented just 5 percent of signatories to peace agreements and 8 percent of negotiators. 

The CFR Interactive Report “Women’s Participation in Peace Processes” presents this new data and explores women’s roles in major peace agreements from 1990 to the present, including ongoing efforts in Afghanistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Myanmar, Syria, and Yemen. The multimedia interactive report features:

•    shareable data visualizations; 
•    the first-ever interactive index tracking women’s participation in formal roles in peace processes from 1990 to present;
•    in-depth case studies of how women participate in peace processes and why their inclusion advances security, including in Syria’s ongoing negotiations and the recent peace accord in Colombia;
•    profiles of women who have contributed to peace processes around the world, such as Monica McWilliams of Northern Ireland and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia; and
•    tools for policymakers to support the inclusion of women in peace processes.

Explore the interactive report at cfr.org/women-peace.