Legislating Peace: How Gender Diverse Rebel Parties Encourage the Implementation of Gender Peace Agreement Provisions w/ Elizabeth Brannon

Previous research demonstrates that women’s participation in peace processes has an important impact on the adoption of gendered peace provisions and the duration of post-conflict peace. However, whether and how women influence the implementation of these provisions is unclear. We argue that women political representatives will shape the implementation of gender provisions in peace agreements. In particular, we expect that women’s continued roles within former belligerent organizations (“rebel parties”) will shape party interests and priorities in implementation, increasing the overall likelihood that gendered peace provisions will be executed fully. We further theorize that women who participated in rebel organizations during civil conflicts will have a unique influence  on rebel party interests, which helps further the implementation of gender peace terms. We test the relationship between women’s political representation and the implementation of gender peace provisions using a novel dataset focusing on the implementation of agreements signed in Africa conflicts between 1990 to 2024. We break down types of representation to capture any women’s parliamentary representation, women’s representation within rebel parties, and the representation of former rebel women in parliament. We supplement our statistical analyses with case evidence from Angola, Rwanda and Colombia. Overall, we show that women’s parliamentary representation, especially that of former rebels in rebel parties, has a clear positive effect on compliance with provisions that address gender. These novel findings make important contributions to our understanding of women’s post-war political influence, the implementation of gendered peace provisions, and rebel party politics.