GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF RECONCILIATION | DR HELEN SCANLON male community members may compromise women both economically and legally. so their stories often drift, unacknowledged’.66 As a result, much of the literature on gender and reconciliation has tried to recover stories of women’s involvement in informal peace processes, as will be explored below. Reconciliation processes have also tended to delineate between “primary” and “secondary” victims. Ni Aoláin’s discussion of communities of harm reveals how in situations of gross human rights violations those related to direct victims are often equally traumatised. She notes how “many women know and feel instinctively when harm comes to those connected to them: that the harm is not disembodied and unrelated to them but they feel and experience it as a direct harm to the self”.62 Indeed a study of peace-building following the Rwandan genocide revealed more women than men lost a close family member and 40 percent of women were widowed. By comparison only three percent of men had lost their spouse.63 Thus narrow definitions of what constitutes a victim and a perpetrator in reconciliation processes tends to obfuscate the long-term impact of violations on secondary victims and their dependents. The passage of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security was intended to mitigate women’s exclusion from the international peace and security agenda. Resolution 1325 provided the first official acknowledgement of the links between gender and conflict and proposes a legal framework for addressing women’s peace and security concerns at local, regional and international levels. It has since been supported by six further resolutions on Women, Peace and Security: resolutions 1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106 and 2122.67 A 2015 United Nations study into the fifteen years since the passage of UNSC Resolution 1325 claims that peace processes that included women as witnesses, signatories, mediators, and/or negotiators demonstrated a 20 percent increase in the probability of a peace agreement lasting at least two years. The report notes that this positive impact was shown to rise over time, with a 35 percent increase in the probability of a peace agreement lasting 15 years.68 In a further study of 40 peace processes it was suggested that there was a higher probability of an agreement being reached where women’s groups were able to influence the negotiation process. This research also suggested that a demonstrable role by women’s organisations in negotiation processes correlated with a greater likelihood of agreements being implemented.69 What these studies do not reveal is if it could be shown that it was the involvement of women per se that was the influential factor or if these positive results in peace agreements were the consequence of these processes generally being more inclusive. Gender and the International Discourse on Reconciliation: Peace Processes and Resolution 1325 Addressing gender issues is a critical aspect of reconciliation at both the local and institutional levels. As has been noted above, reconciliation should be a holistic process that extends beyond those subject to violations and the perpetrators to include all facets of society. Generally, including women in decision-making positions has been seen as a route to address the inequalities between men and women. This has led to numerous commitments at the regional and international level for quotas to promote the visibility of women in the public space. Thus, the first wave of literature focused on gender and reconciliation revealed the lack of women in high-level peace negotiations. Despite some advancement in the inclusion of women in peace negotiations, progress has been uneven. For example, in the 2015 peace process in Mali all diplomats involved in the international mediation team were men over fifty-five years of age. Further, among the 100 delegates at the talks, there were only five women. The lead mediator, Algeria, suggested that women’s involvement was not central to the negotiations due to cultural reasons, fear that their involvement would delay the negotiations, and “a preference for leaving women’s participation for the “reconciliation” phase, once an agreement has been reached”.70 According to a 2012 United Nations report on 300 peace agreements only 18 accords, relating to just ten conflicts, mention sexual violence or other forms of gender-based violence. The report also revealed that none of these peace agreements recognised sexual violence in their proposals for reparations, economic recovery or development measures.64 This can in part be explained by the fact that between 1990 and 2010 women made up less than five percent of all signatories to peace agreements. In addition, they constituted only three percent of chief mediators and formed less than nine percent of the negotiators in official peace processes. Bell and O’Rourke have observed that women’s inclusion in peace agreement texts is “an important starting point in achieving other political, legal and social gains for women”. They suggest references to women can be significant at the stage of “ceasefire and pre-negotiation agreements; framework agreements which set out the arrangements for substantively settling the conflict; and implementation agreements that address implementation of the framework agreement”.65 However, as Elizabeth Porter notes women’s contributions to reconciliation are currently largely “informal, ad hoc and rarely part of formal peace processes, Kenya, on the other hand, is often cited as a successful attempt to incorporate women in peace negotiations. The 2008 peace talks following the 2007 post-electoral violence included five women - Graça Machel as advisor, two female negotiators, Martha Karua, and Sally Kosgei, a seniorlevel political adviser from the UN, Margaret Vogt, and a female adviser from the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, Meredith Preston McGhie.71 It is important to not overstate the role of these individuals (nor to down play continuing high levels of gender discrimination in Kenya) and Martha Karua provides a good example of how employing a negotiator with a political mandate does not result in the 6