Women and Post-conflict State-building: The Stories Indicators Tell

Doris Buss (Associate Professor, Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University)

This paper considers how women’s economic roles are included, or more often erased, in international frameworks on peace and security. Various multi-lateral organizations, from the United Nations to the OECD, are developing indicators by which to track and measure peace and statebuilding programming in conflict-affected countries. This paper starts from the premise that these indicators are important sites of international governance and norm-building. Examining indicators can reveal much about the frameworks that will determine funding and the direction of programming intervention. Drawing on emerging studies of women in artisanal and small-scale mining on the African continent, this paper examines the complex picture suggested about women’s roles in post-conflict economies. From this basis, the paper then considers peace and statebuilding indicators developed by the United Nations, to monitor Security Resolution 1325, and those developed by the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, in terms of their portrayal of women and their post-conflict needs.

Organiser: Dr Gina Heathcote

Contact email: gh21@soas.ac.uk