Building a State that Works for Women: Intergrating Gender in Post-Conflict State-Building

Support for state building has become the dominant model for international engagement in post-conflict and fragile contexts. The OECD DAC defines state building as “an endogenous process to enhance capacity, institutions and legitimacy of the state driven by state-society relations”. It identifies the role of international actors as “supporting and facilitating the political and institutional processes that can strengthen the foundations of a resilient state and society”. Donor approaches to state building currently lack any substantial gender analysis. They have not engaged with existing knowledge about women's relationship to the state; examined
how state building processes impact women and men differently; or asked how women can participate in shaping the state building agenda. While the relationship between state and citizens is weak in most fragile contexts, this is much more pronounced for women citizens. In many fragile contexts women have very limited access to state institutions and their relationship to these is often mediated through family, community or customary institutions. The intensive state building processes that follow the end of conflict can fundamentally transform power relations, political processes and the relationship between state and citizens. They therefore offer an opportunity to develop a state that is accountable and responsive to women. However, as gender issues are inadequately addressed within donor support for state building, these opportunities are often missed. This working paper presents key findings from a joint FRIDE-ODI research project that investigated the impact of state building on women's citizenship. The project was developed in response to gaps in the current state building work. On one hand, theoretical models on state building are elaborated at an abstract level that makes gender power relations invisible. For example, these tend to model the relationship between state, elites and an undisaggregated “society” without asking who is represented within each group, who participates in state-society negotiations, and whose expectations and demands are expressed within these negotiations. On the other hand, although donor policies do stress that state building should be an inclusive process, they are vague on how this – and specifically the inclusion of women - is to be achieved. The project involved research in five post-conflict countries, Burundi, Guatemala, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Sudan. It investigated three central questions: What role do women play in state building? How do state building processes affect women's political participation? How do state building processes affect women's rights? The findings highlighted that post-conflict contexts do provide new opportunities for women to mobilise. However, their ability to influence state building processes is limited both by structural barriers and by opposition from elites. While women have made some significant gains in terms of formal equality and inclusion, informal patterns of power and resource allocation have been much harder to shift. It appears that gender inequalities
in these contexts are innately linked to the underlying political settlement, including the balance of power between formal and customary authorities. It is therefore critical that donors address gender as a fundamentally political issue.

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