It is now my distinct pleasure to introduce to you our panel.
We have first Dr. Kevin Technical.
Kevin is a post-doctoral research fellow working on the Difford funded focussed on this research programme, in effect.
One of my and Laura's colleagues, whose work focuses on inclusion and polke power sharing and peace agreements,
is Puchi at Queen's University, Belfast Motor Cross Community Identities in Deeply Divided Societies.
The case of the Northern Irish Identity. He also has three interest in national identity, Clearlake psychology.
Northern Ireland and Brexit Cabinet will be speaking about using the Paris Peace
Agreement database to understand gender perspectives in peace agreements.
Thanks very much for attending the conference today.
Could do some much thanks to everyone that Tim and everyone else organising the conference today under such difficult time.
Really horrible circumstances. So thanks very much for that.
I will be talking to you about the tax database and you can be used to try and evaluate the extent to which gender perspectives,
existence, secure peace agreements. And I as Tim says, I'm part of the Political Settlements Research Programme,
and you can find out more about that under the tax database at the Web site at the bottom of the page there.
But the main part of the work is Political Settlements Programme, a research programme.
Is this tax database. And that's a collection of.
Almost 2000 peace agreements from between 1990 and the present day.
And it said these are collected. And the organisers that categorised in a range of different ways they'll be talking about.
But we also have various thematic streams.
One of those is one major area of work is gender and trying to evaluate gender perspectives in peace processes.
So, yes, I say the taxpayers have in this current form,
in the current version of 1832 peace agreements since the entire Cold War, post-Cold War period.
And this is covers around about 140 for peace processes around the world.
These are available in full text in their original language text translated into English.
In one of the current versions,
you're able to download the text in such a way that you can actually analysing using the types of qualitative analysis software.
But. Were the major part of work was done and mercifully was done before I arrived there, it was done by Lorena and her colleagues.
These were coded meticulously line by line, all over 250 variables to say whether it contains, let's say, virus sharing.
If it does, what kind of power sharing?
It had references to international human rights law, etc., etc., etc. So these can be categorised in a variety of ways.
We've also categorised them in such a way that we've created sub databases.
So there's actually a pox gender which only contains those agreements that contain references to women, girls and gender.
And just recently we've just started. And Tim was a huge part of this project for local peace agreements.
These are agreements that are specifically about ones, a subset of the country,
one particular part of the country, rather than a than for the entire country itself.
And I've just included this timeline at the bottom. I'm not going to fully explain it, but really,
it's one of the things that we try and do is try and use visualisation methods to try and explain peace
processes and just show how messy and complex they are and try and bring unexpected results for way.
So what are we talking about when we talk about the gender perspective, because we're all here 20 years after 13,
25, which insists on a gender perspective and peace processes of peace agreements.
But it doesn't really define it very well. If you want to try and find a similarly supranational organisation that does have a definition,
the International Criminal Court does talk about it, requiring an understanding of different societies and rules.
These three males and females. And this is a reasonably good definition.
But whenever we are actually studying the peace agreements and themselves,
the kinds of things that we're looking for are whether or not women inputted into the peace process and the agreement.
And that in particular is one of the most difficult things to evaluate. Many peace agreements don't even have signature stand of them.
So you can't even see the names that were put through them.
Only very, very few will have a photo opportunity where there's a handshake moment that you can actually
maybe identify that the women that were in the peace process was much easier to find out,
as if the peace agreement itself contains provisions for material gains for women.
And whether it's a structured around gender empire imbalances.
One of the interesting pieces of work I'm actually looking at at the minute is in the piece that
I've worked on recently is this difference between provisions that are material gains for women,
almost as if they are charitable donations from on high vs. provisions that really make Empire women's organisations.
This is a slightly different thing with credit comes in different contexts.
I just want to highlight some of the pieces of work that have been done as part of the political settlements research programme, really?
There are fifty three fifty three pieces of published work on our on our Web site that refer to gender specifically.
And so I've just chosen these as a way of highlighting some of the spread of different things that we're things we're interested in.
So there's the local peace processes and the opportunities and challenges for
women's engagement that Laura was working on with Rob Foster and Christine Ali.
If you upset, I'm talking about the different strategies these women can employ to try and that leverage themselves
into local peace processes because there are particularly difficulties with those kinds of agreements.
Similarly, with ceasefires, as we find ceasefires tend to have a low level of inclusion of women and understanding the kinds of
examples that do exist there and ways in which women can serve itself into the process are useful.
Similarly, with accessing political power and power sharing, peace processes and sharing is a particular avenue that I'm interested in.
And that is particularly controversial from a gender perspective because there are very good testimony,
very good stories of exclusion of women in political power sharing, where there where the elites.
It'll be an elite pack that excludes various other constituencies,
but also the peace agreements themselves sometimes have some very interesting provisions for women.
And when talking about published work and PSAP, I always talk about Monica Williams and Jessica Doyle's work on intimate partner violence.
I really do recommend looking at that, even though it doesn't focus on the FOX database itself.
It's one of the most important in terms of the findings.
I don't think the findings have necessarily been obvious that it wasn't for this research.
The findings are important for policymakers in a post-conflict society, but also from an academic perspective.
I think the methods that are really good and it's likely to replicate Sophie's work from many decades ago.
I definitely recommend any of those. We just got one of the benefits of the PAX database is that it means that things like 13 twenty five where it
actually makes calls for provisions for gender perspectives and you can actually start putting numbers to them.
So in paragraph, if A it says the special needs of women,
girls and during repatriation or resettlement and rehabilitation and rehabilitation, it can take into consideration.
Well, if we actually look at the other, we see only two percent of agreements actually refer to women in reconstruction.
Only one percent of agreements were referred to women as refugees.
And as we go on, we actually find a very, very few agreements, do makes make provisions for women and women.
It's quite disappointing. But what we do find is if we plot them across a long time, we do see an upward trend.
So whereas in 1990, we would only seem to by less than 10 percent of these agreements, referring to women, girls and gender at all, these days,
we'll be closer to 50 percent and is a market in the various U.N. Security Council resolutions that that provide for these things.
But I'll let you decide for yourself what that looks like, a cause and effect.
I'm not entirely sure if that is a preferred massive effect of 13, 25 or rather, was there already a Sloup occurring there?
Maybe 13, 25 was a manifestation of the norms that were already pre-existing at that time.
This graph on its own isn't very useful because it referred.
It suggests that any agreement that makes any reference to women, girls and gender is as good as the age as another.
And that's certainly not the case.
But if we don't give each agreement a gender score, which goes between zero, meaning it doesn't refer to women, girls or gender.
Oh. Allow them. Meaning refers to every single one of these different variables.
Does it include women's equality, particular groups of women, violence against woman development, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?
We find that only one agreement out of the database comes up with a score of eleven, and that's the sums of the agreement in the DRC.
But if we were to take an average every year, we also see an upward trend over time,
which looks good until you look at the y axis and find very rarely does it actually overcall over one,
which means on average, a peace agreement will only mention one of these things.
And generally it's quite a passing comment anyway. If we break down the agreements by stage of the peace process.
We find that there are big differences there.
So we talk about cease fires and agreements that just bring conflict to an end and they make up a sizeable proportion of the database,
but they only make up. Eleven are only 11 percent of them will make reference to women, girls and gender.
Similarly, pre negotiation agreements.
But once we get to substantive, comprehensive agreements, which are really your at your handshake moments where the words media come,
you could Friday agreement, state and agreements, things like that, 60 percent of them will make reference to women, girls and gender.
And it indicates that when peace processes don't follow a logical trajectory,
it does appear that those agreements at the latter end of the peace process are more likely to refer to women.
But whenever it's the early stages, especially ceasefires of pre negotiations,
when these kind of norms could really be normalised and the the arts, they're very, very rare.
And whenever you see when they are, they do exist there. You can see just how important those provisions can be.
And how much more time can. OK, good.
Right. So there is a there has been a perspective that perhaps if women,
girls and gender are inserted into the peace process and the peace process and a peace agreement has a gender perspective,
what this might do is exclude other non dominant groups.
It's almost as if there's a competition between groups, not dominant groups, to try to insert themselves into the peace process.
And if one group is included, others are marginalised. Well, what this graph indicates is that it's not the case.
So, for example, disabled people in peace processes that have no agreements referring to women, girls and gender.
Only two percent of them refer to disabled people at all.
But amongst those peace processes that do refer to women, over 60 percent are almost 60 percent.
So there is a really large correlation here between the inclusion of women and the inclusion of other non dominant groups.
It seems as if some agreements and some processes have a norm of inclusion.
But doesn't that goes beyond just women and girls and gender and includes a lot of other non dominant groups of people?
This graph does come with a heavy caveat, though,
which is in a large proportion of agreements to make these references the use an almost identical sentence to each other.
And that sentence runs along the lines of this peace agreement will provide provisions for women, children, the elderly, disabled.
And it's rather it's a rather tokenistic tick box exercise of different vulnerable
constituencies rather than a more holistic way of having a gender perspective.
And in all types of provisions, you can really see the difference in some agreements where there's a gender perspective
that runs through the entire document as opposed to a one off sentence here or there.
If I've got time to explain something in this boring looking graph,
but the interesting thing for me is the one line at the bottom to try and find here is by gender quotas and direct
correlation with power sharing as power sharing agreements like you have in Northern Ireland are what really interest me.
What you find is curiously, whereas B, whether or not the U.
N was involved correlates with this, or about twice as many of them make reference to gender quotas.
But power sharing agreements are made seven times more likely to contain reference to to gender quotas.
Not only that, they're also much more likely to be implemented in reality.
If you actually look up to see if these ever came to the light of day after they were written into the agreement,
which is for some reason, power sharing seems to correlate very highly with inclusion of women in the document.
No, I can't comment on what happens in reality.
And that necessarily afterwards, except for the fact that these quotas are do seem to be executed in the majority of times.
I think it is an important area for future research. And that's something I'm looking at.
Some of it is. One minute remaining.
Thank you very much, sir. Yes.
So I think it's an important avenue for you for for further research and identify what kind of
power sharing agreements are more amenable to the inclusion of women and which ones are not.
And I think I've identified some of these trends. And that is beyond the scope of this presentation to kind of finish up with
a few recommendations that come not just from the piece that I wrote there,
is that these have come from some of the more wider streams of gender research within PSAP.
And the most important message from any of this is, if you take home nothing else,
is that peace agreements tends not to refer to women, girls or gender at all.
They just don't. And any information that them at all is it is better than the average at it.
There should be more attention to including provisions from in the early stages, especially in the cease fire and pre negotiation stages,
because these can could develop a norm of inclusion that continues on throughout the process.
And finally, it's really important to not just have recommendations or provisions for women.
It has to have a way of supporting organisations of women themselves to be able to video of marginalised within marginalised communities themselves.
So I have to leave it there. Thank you very much. Very much indeed, Kevin, for taking the time for preparing these slides.
Really bringing the PEX data to life. Thank you very much.