INTRODUCTION: THE GENDERED NATURE OF PEACEMAKING

In looking at peace processes, at how agreements are negotiated and what implications these have for women, it is useful to understand that peace processes are inherently gendered. They are negotiated by protagonists of conflict, who are primarily men in positions of power and are often mediated or facilitated by men. High-level negotiations are identified as male domains, which means that they also employ discourses and practices that are closer to men's reality than to women’s.

Formal peace processes rarely acknowledge the experience of conflict mediation, management and resolution employed by communities who have to survive conflict on a day-to-day basis. They also ignore the attempts at conflict resolution initiated by civil society throughout periods of war and strife, many of which are led by women. Indeed, early literature on women and armed conflict was gender blind, and was as oblivious to women's participation in peace building and peace making as it was to women's complicity in violence. Women were instead positioned as victims of war in need of protection, particularly from sexual violence, while less attention was paid to women's everyday lived experience of conflict, displacement, shift ing gender roles and agential moments.

Feminist theorising has since served to provide a nuanced understanding of how conflict affects women differently from men and how it also affects women in different ways depending on their ethnic, religious, caste, and class, regional and other identities and belongings, including their political affiliations. Protracted conflict and long term displacement also provide opportunities for greater personal and group autonomy and changes in identity, status and leadership for some women despite the initial or continuing trauma of dislocation and dispossession.

However women affected by violent conflict, continue in the main to be perceived as the archetype of marginalisation, discrimination and disempowerment and their identity and autonomy is assimilated into the universal category of ‘victim’. While normative frames bound by patriarchy contribute to such constructions, a range of human rights and humanitarian discourses and practices also tend to view women exclusively as ‘victims’ and imbue their responses with a strong protectionist bias.