Pieces of Peace: Women and Gender in Peace Agreements

In September 2024, Design Informatics (DI) PhD candidates Jenny Long and Jinrui Wang participated in The Conflict Research Society Conference 2024 and held an exhibition Pieces of Peace: Women and Gender in Peace Agreements in the MacLaren Stuart Room at the Old College, University of Edinburgh. Jenny and Jinrui worked with their DI colleagues Tara Capel, Uta Hinrichs and other UoE colleagues Tomas Vancisin, Laura Wise, Xinhuan Shu, to organise a successful exhibition and would like to share some information and reflection on it.

Peace agreements are a common practice in the resolution and regulation of modern conflict, with over 2000 peace agreements reached in more than 150 peace processes worldwide since 1990. However, only 21% of peace agreements contain provisions addressing women, gender, and/or sexual violence. In this project, we examine the extent to which women and gender are explicitly acknowledged or addressed in peace agreements, drawing on data from the PA-X Peace Agreement Database. Using debossing, we physicalize the mentions of women and gender in these agreements as a means to provoke reflection and discussion of these often-overlooked constituencies and issues.

We chose to explore women and gender references in peace agreements through the lens of peace agreements from the 2000s post-intervention process in Afghanistan, as – unusually –  a majority of the agreements in this peace process contain references to women, girls and gender equality. However, the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 has stripped women of their fundamental rights, dignity, and freedoms, leaving the promise of these agreements in a state of regression. Through the context of Afghanistan, we see that even in peace processes which do incorporate the differential needs of women and girls, these hard won gains can be quickly lost, and difficult to regain.

Visitors were invited to take part in the project in several ways. Firstly, you could listen to a recording of the ‘Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Reestablishment of Permanent Government Institutions’ (commonly known as the ‘Bonn Agreement’), read by Mursal Ahmadzai and Amanullah Ahmadzai in Dari, one of the official languages in which the agreement was distributed. Secondly, you could physically trace the debossed text on copies of peace agreements, to make both the text and the collective effort to uncover gender perspectives more visible. Thirdly, you could leave a comment in our project notebook, to let us know what you think about the issues raised in the exhibit.

Pieces of Peace: Women and Gender in Peace Agreements was an exhibition submission I worked on with my colleagues Jinrui Wang, Tomas Vancisin, Laura Wise, Xinhuan Shu, Tara Capel, and Uta Hinrichs. The IEEE VISAP 2024 accepted the project for both the pictorial and exhibition tracks. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to showcase it in advance at the Conflict Research Society Conference 2024. I had the opportunity to engage in discussions with domain experts from the conflict research field. Through the discussion with them, I received insights and stories from Afghanistan activists and volunteers who helped refugees at the frontier. The importance of focusing on women, girls, gender, and/or sexual violence has never been greater, especially in light of global events. As I write this, the news of the Taliban’s oppression of women in Afghanistan, including their ban on public speaking, disheartens me. This work has ignited discussions about the underrepresentation of women and the need for these documents to go beyond mere paper representation, advocating for girls, women, gender minorities, and sexual minorities to experience the peace and transition that this agreement governs. However, the agreements still lack practical applications and tangible action. Overall, it was a wonderful experience to gain perspectives from outside the visualization community. I look forward to hearing more feedback from future exhibitions of this work.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the following for their support: Mursal Ahmadzai and Amanullah Ahmadzai; the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep), funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office; and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics and the School of Law.