This week marks four years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues; the internal war in Myanmar has been ongoing since 2021, and so on with at least a dozen other conflicts. And amidst so much bitterness, a scientific article published this year in the International Political Science Review In which Giuditta Fontana, from the University of Birmingham, and colleagues from the same university and the University of Hamburg conclude that, when women participate in peace processes, the probability of the conflict reigniting is reduced by at least 11%, reaching up to 37% when the UN intervenes.
Why do some peace processes succeed in ending large-scale violence while others fail in the attempt?
This is the question the research team set out to answer with a research project spanning from the battlefields of the Philippines to the streets of Liberia. To do so, they analyzed in depth 14 protracted peace processes in recurring civil wars, looking for patterns where others saw only devastation. This analysis revealed that the UN, working with local women's organizations, was able to create and maintain peace agreements. They statistically compared this with 286 agreements reached in violent conflicts worldwide. The conclusion, therefore, was confirmed: when the UN and women-led organizations work together, the likelihood of a war not erupting again increases significantly.
However, the team didn't stop at the numbers. To understand what lay behind the statistics, they delved into on-the-ground case studies in the Bangsamoro region of Mindanao, as well as in Burundi, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. These societies, scarred by war, each offer valuable lessons in their own way on how to build lasting peace. The results were clear: UN leadership and the inclusion of women in post-conflict society are not secondary factors but decisive elements for ensuring that peace is not fleeting.
Dialogue between methods is essential. Quantitative data may show that agreements with female representation have a higher survival rate after ten or fifteen years, but it is interviews with mediators and local actors that reveal how issues such as transitional justice, reparations, and social rights are introduced, how bridges are built between factions, and how inclusion translates into trust. Without this second, qualitative layer, the numbers remain meaningless.
There is also a fundamental political lesson to be learned. For too long, the presence of women in decision-making spaces has been justified in terms of representativeness. Research shows that it is also a matter of institutional effectiveness. If diversity improves the quality of agreements and reduces their fragility, then exclusion is not only unfair: it is inefficient.
