Call for Papers - Power-Sharing Pacts and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Constructive Engagements

*Call for Papers*

Power-Sharing Pacts and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda:  

Constructive Engagements

Queen’s University Belfast

6-7 November 2015

Queen’s University Belfast will host a two-day workshop titled “Power-Sharing Pacts and the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda: Constructive Engagements” on 6-7 November 2015. The workshop will explore the intersections of ethnonationalism and gender in comprehensive peace processes. Specifically, we will examine the extent to which power-sharing theories and practices can address new challenges emanating from the women, peace and security agenda.

This workshop is designed to push the boundaries of two important conflict resolution strategies: ethnopolitical power-sharing practices, such as consociationalism, and the women, peace and security agenda, embodied in international legal instruments like UN Security Council Resolution 1325. Whereas power-sharing focuses on major ethnic and national cleavages, the women, peace and security agenda focuses on women and other marginalized actors. Both strategies are typically constructed in oppositional terms by theorists and practitioners. As such, the goal of this workshop is to find constructive areas of engagement and solidarity between them.

2015 marks the 15-year anniversary of UNSCR 1325, heralding a moment of critical reflection on the women, peace, and security agenda. In light of the anniversary, the workshop poses the following questions: 

To what extent can power-sharing theories and practices accommodate the women, peace and security agenda?

To date, what impact has women, peace, and security activism and advocacy had on the negotiation and implementation of power-sharing pacts in war-torn societies?

For societies emerging from conflict, how do power-sharing practices and the women, peace and security agenda intersect with transitional justice processes?

We invite paper proposals that engage with the empirical, normative, and/or methodological challenges of reconciling ethnonationalism and gender in power-sharing pacts as well as paperproposals that situate power sharing and/or the women, peace and security agenda in a transitional justice framework.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

·      single or comparative case studies of the successful/unsuccessful integration of women, peace and security goals in contemporary or historical power-sharing pacts, such as Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burundi, Cyprus, Lebanon and elsewhere

·      normative considerations of the tensions and/or affinities between the women, peace and security agenda, power-sharing pacts and processes of transitional justice

·      methodological innovations for the study of gender and ethnonationalism in power-sharing theory and practice

·      power-sharing, gender and identity in conflict resolution and post-conflict transitions

·      feminist analyses of power-sharing pacts

·      transitional justice processes that may/may not facilitate constructive engagements between power-sharing and the women, peace and security agenda

·      women’s experiences in power-sharing peace processes

 Both ethnopolitical power-sharing and the women, peace and security agenda are important norms championed by national governments, international agencies, and conflict resolution scholars over the last decade and a half. This workshop takes the first step in exploring the possibilities and limits of bringing these norms together in theory and practice.

The workshop is sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict (Queen’s University Belfast), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Political Studies Association Specialist Group on Ethnopolitics.

 Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a brief biographical statement to the conveners Siobhan Byrne (siobhan.byrne@ualberta.ca) and Allison McCulloch (mccullocha@brandonu.ca) by 1 June 2015. Graduate students are encouraged to apply and should indicate in their submission whether they wish to be considered for modest workshop travel support. Policy practitioners are also encouraged to apply.