About the event: The Women, Peace and Security sector advocates for the inclusion of designated gender experts in peace processes to improve outcomes for women. However, empirical support for their effectiveness remains inconclusive. This talk questions whether gender experts are influential or ineffective advocates for women. While their explicit commitment to gendered issues may benefit women, the overt femininity of the role may disadvantage their capacity in overtly masculine security spaces. Leveraging an original dataset capturing the role of 2299 delegates across 116 comprehensive peace agreements finalized between 1990 and 2021, we find that gender experts increase the likelihood that agreements contain provisions for women. However, interviews and archival analysis suggest that the systemic structure of peace negotiations constrains gender experts’ overall influence. Consequently, we explain how gender experts are simultaneously powerful and powerless. Findings capture gender experts’ limitations, caution against policy that makes gender experts solely responsible for gendered considerations in peace processes, and contribute to understanding gendered power dynamics in negotiations more broadly.

About the speaker: Elizabeth is a CISAC Postdoctoral Fellow and previously held fellowships at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, the US Institute of Peace, Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Her research focuses on Women, Peace and Security, and explores power dynamics in peace negotiations. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and she previously worked as a Gender Specialist with the UN in Kosovo and as a Gender Consultant for USAID in Ghana.

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