| Summary: | This dissertation examines women’s rights provisions in peace agreements in the post-Cold War period. Its central research questions are: ‘Why are women’s rights included in so many contemporary peace agreements?’ and ‘Why are they framed almost exclusively in human rights language?’ The dissertation is situated at the nexus of four literatures. It speaks to international relations literature on norm diffusion by illuminating the impact of international norms on peace processes – a topic which has so far been neglected. It contributes to gender and conflict literature by advancing a theory of women’s mobilization in response to war and by specifying the causal pathways by which women’s networks gain access to peace processes. It offers theoretical refinement to mediation/negotiation theory by demonstrating that civil society groups use peace processes to achieve particular objectives not directly related to peace. Finally, it reveals causal mechanisms that may explain how liberal democratic norms are reproduced in peace processes, contributing to war termination and peacebuilding literatures. The dissertation includes three major components. The first is a large-n analysis of 135 peace agreements signed between 1989 and 2005. I explicate references to women in those agreements, assessing the degree to which they reflect international standards. The second part consists of the three case studies of Burundi, Northern Ireland, and Macedonia. Here, I trace the processes by which women’s rights were included or excluded in each of the three peace settlements. In the third section, I test the findings from the case studies on the large-n data set used in the first section.
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