“We have already talked so much about our difficulties but everyone just listens. Everyone listens. They do nothing  […]  just listening, recording and taking pictures. Nothing happened. So I don’t even feel like talking anymore.”

These are the words of an ex-fighter from the district of Bardiya, in Western Nepal. She had been one of the many women to join the Maoist uprising and fight as a combatant in Nepal’s decade-long civil war which ran from 1996 to 2006. Twelve years later, in 2018, she shared her experiences of the reconciliation processes that had been underway since the end of the conflict. The researchers discovered that similar feelings of dissatisfaction and alienation were particularly pronounced among women.

This gendered difference surprised Prakash Bhattarai, who led the Nepalese part of the project, which was also undertaken in Sri Lanka, where a civil war ended in 2009. The idea that women are more supportive of peace processes than men is common in the peacebuilding world, and for good reason: women’s movements often play a central role in bringing warring parties to peace negotiations. But after speaking with more than 2,000 women and men in both countries about their views on post-war peace initiatives, the researchers found that women were more sceptical than men of certain common post-conflict practices.

Today, as war rages in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, it may feel premature to talk about peace. But as the continuing difficulties in striking a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas or securing an end to fighting in Ukraine show, peace processes are always complicated. That’s why it’s important to make sure they are meaningful for everyone touched by war, no matter their gender.

With regard to these devastating conflicts of 2024, Karen Brounéus, who led the study in Sri Lanka and Nepal, says the international community must “ensure that women are included in the peace process as war is still happening. Previous research shows that when women are involved in peace processes in influential, meaningful ways, this decreases the risk of a return to war and increases the legitimacy and quality of the peace agreement.”

Peace begins locally

In Nepal and Sri Lanka, increased scepticism among women was only found for local truth-telling and reintegration programmes: no difference of opinion was found when it came to national initiatives. But all these elements of the post-conflict “toolkit” are often required and administered by international bodies in post-conflict zones as a prerequisite for receiving desperately needed funds.

Brounéus started working on gender and peace 20 years ago in Rwanda, where she demonstrated the potential dangers of truth-telling exercises. In Rwanda, peacebuilding processes required communities to come together to bear witness to atrocities that had taken place during the war. But Brounéus found that people were frequently retraumatised by having to speak about what had happened. Many were stigmatised, harassed, threatened or even killed as a result of telling their stories, and this was particularly the case for women.

The latest study in Nepal and Sri Lanka adds to something of a pattern. Similar issues have been seen in other post-conflict zones, including in the Solomon Islands. Brounéus, Bhattarai and their colleagues conclude that international peacebuilding practice is blind to the everyday insecurities that women face after war – and needs to change.

Brounéus told me: “We know that violence against women increases during and after war. But a peace agreement doesn’t mean peace at home or security at home. Actually the violence just continues. And on top of this, there are initiatives taken in their communities that increase the level of local risk, such as living next to someone who has perpetrated violence.”

Every opportunity for change

The effects of this failure are perhaps particularly stark in the Nepalese context. Around a third of the Maoist People’s Liberation Army were women. Many were drawn to join the Maoist rebels because they saw an opportunity to break down the oppressive social hierarchies of gender, caste, ethnicity and religion that defined life in Nepal. Gender equality was central to the Maoist movement, and 2006’s peace agreement gave the Maoists access to political power-sharing. There was therefore every opportunity to focus on empowering women once peace was reached.

Although there have been some significant feminist wins politically (with 33% of seats at both federal and local levels reserved for women since 2015, a direct result of Maoist demands), real change hasn’t happened. Women were central to the nonviolent movement that was a catalyst for the end of the war, but were not part of the high-level peace negotiation process. Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes either excluded women or focused on gender stereotypical tasks such as sewing and hairdressing. Social inclusion (access to education and finance, for example) has not improved. Many previous combatants have withdrawn from politics.

Worst of all, perhaps, justice for war victims has not been prioritised. The conflict had a particularly devastating impact on Nepali women. Thousands were killed, abducted, disappeared, and made homeless. Rape, sexual abuse and torture of women were common, committed by both government forces and the Maoist rebels. More than 9,000 women were widowed. Today, war widows and female ex-combatants are often stigmatised by their communities.

Nepal’s Truth and Reconciliation Process, which began in 2015, has received over 63,000 complaints of human rights violations. But 17 years on from the peace agreement, preliminary investigations of only around 4,000 have been conducted. Bhattarai told me: “The women I speak to are still waiting for justice. They want to know what happened to relatives who were disappeared. They want to know who
committed crimes. Psychological fear remains. They are living with severe trauma.”

‘Too little listening’

So: how much of this is down to failures within international peacebuilding? And how can we do better?

“On one of my first trips to Sri Lanka,”  Brounéus told me, “someone said: ‘You have to tell Geneva to stop pressuring us to set up these truth-telling processes’”. Many, like the women in Nepal, felt that they had told their stories many times but that they weren’t being listened to. They felt that nothing had resulted from the commissions. She observed the same thing in the Solomon Islands, where ex-combatants hadn’t told the whole truth and attitudes towards them had actually worsened with time.

Brounéus says this doesn’t mean truth-telling initiatives should be abandoned entirely – to the contrary, she says they are crucial for peace and trust –  but rather we should change the approach.  “Currently, the international community often takes too much of a cookie-cutter or box-ticking approach, and this approach is often blind to the particular needs and insecurities of women,” Brounéus says.

She cites Colombia as representing the best example of an inclusive and gender-sensitive peace process to date. When negotiations began, only one woman was sitting at the table. But after strong resistance from the Colombian feminist movement, the negotiation table became more representative and the agreement included many gender provisions, including the first ever inclusion of LGBTQ rights in a formal peace process. Still, it wasn’t enough: the agreement was later rejected by the public at the polls, and promises enshrined in agreement have not materialised.

This speaks to Bhattarai’s concerns. “Signing a peace agreement or writing a new constitution is not the end of a peace process – it’s the beginning.” Bhattarai estimates that in the immediate aftermath of the Nepalese civil war, there were 150-200 international organisations supporting Nepal’s peace process. Now, 17 years on, he can count those remaining on one hand.

“Peacebuilding requires long term intervention,” he says. “It’s about restructuring society. 15-20 years of sustained commitment is required.”

But as war rages around the world, Brounéus strikes a note of hope. “It is key to remember that most people do not wage war,” she says. “Research (and a quick empirical glance) shows that the majority of all people everywhere want to live in peace. This is important because we can forget that the very few who hold power and decide to send others out to wage war, are not representative of everyone living in that place.”

“Herein lies a pivotal seed for peace: to begin hearing, lifting, empowering those who are getting on with life and working for peace in the seemingly smallest of ways, amidst war. We want to live with kindness, compassion, care, in peacefulness. Sometimes, we need to remind ourselves of this, and that peace is in fact possible.”

Research Round-up

Here’s what else is making the news in gender inequality research:

1. 🍖 A large study looking at the eating habits of people across 23 countries has
   confirmed that men tend to eat more meat than women across cultures, and more surprisingly, that these gender differences are greatest in the most gender-equal countries.
2. 🩺 Medical device trials in the US still don’t involve enough women, researchers have found. The proportion of women represented in high-risk medical device trials did not increase from 2010 to 2020.
3. 🚀 It looks as though women may be better suited than men to the bodily stresses of spaceflight. A preliminary study found that gene activity is more disrupted in men.

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About The Evidence

The Evidence is a supplement to the Impact newsletter designed to help you understand gender inequality – and show how we might fix it. Impact is a weekly newsletter of feminist journalism, dedicated to the rights of women and gender-diverse people worldwide.

This is the English version of our newsletter; you can read the French one here.