This report is based on a three-year research project on gender in peacebuilding, which involved field research in four countries (Burundi, Colombia, Nepal and Uganda), with a thematic focus on four areas of peacebuilding:
- access to justice (including formal, informal, traditional and transitional justice);
- economic recovery (especially of ex-combatants and of returnee populations of refugees, abductees or internally displaced persons (IDPs));
- inter-generational tensions and conflict; and
- permutations and continuums of violence (e.g. self-inflicted, interpersonal, domestic, sexual and gender-based, criminal, communal and political violence).
- Understanding the context: Gender analysis should be seen as key in the preparation of peacebuilding programmes and policy development, and requires the investment of time and resources. A gender-relational approach to gender analysis for peacebuilding implies a broadly based description of how gender roles and relations work in each particular context, including how gender difference intersects with other identities. It also involves an assessment of how these roles and relations influence a society’s propensity for violent conflict, the extent to which these gender roles and relations might themselves be shaped by violent conflict, and the opportunities they present for transformative change.
- Identifying who to work with and how: A gender-relational approach to gender analysis suggests a broad range of possible interventions; it also enables a sharper focus on groups of people (not necessarily women) who are particularly vulnerable, as well as on those whose attitudes and practices most need to be changed and those most amenable to change. In doing so, it allows policies and interventions to be more precisely targeted and thus more effectively implemented and evaluated. In our case studies, an issue arising across the board has been the vulnerability of men as well as of sexual and gender minorities, something that might be revealed by a relational gender analysis but is often overlooked by programming that assumes vulnerability to be associated with women and children. In different contexts, a gender-relational analysis might suggest focusing, for example, on the particular vulnerabilities or strengths of young, rural, widowed women in a particular location; elderly, lower-class urban men; or educated, well-connected female political change-makers.
- Identifying best ways of working: Adopting a gender-relational approach to peacebuilding means understanding how gender relations and identities influence peace possibilities in a given situation, as well as facilitating transformational change based on that understanding. The experiences documented in our case studies suggest that those approaches that result in positive transformations seem most often to be characterised by inclusivity, dialogue and empowerment. Initiatives that impressed us are inclusive in that they involve women and men, young and old, powerful and powerless, capturing a wide variety of perspectives and knowledge. They use dialogue as one of their main methods, promoting capacities for dialogue and creating the necessary spaces, so that potentially conflicting components of a community can move forward in concert. They are also designed and managed in such a way that programming is driven by some of the women, men and sexual and gender minorities most directly affected by violent conflict, empowering them to promote sustainable change.
In addition to examining the particular gendered dynamics of peacebuilding in the four countries around these four issues, the project also had a more conceptual aim of broadening and deepening the understanding of gender in peacebuilding.
The four case studies provide a number of illustrations of how such an approach might be implemented in practice, and make it clear that there is a wide range of variation possible within an overall gender-relational framework. We have attempted to identify in this synthesis report some of the issues and challenges that arise as a result. While a narrowly circumscribed methodology would clearly be inappropriate, we can nevertheless identify some broad lessons for peacebuilding practice that emerge from the research, as follows:
