What happens to women when conflict comes to an end?

In this episode of Peace and Gender, Andrea Thiis-Evensen meets up with PhD student Sarah Hewitt, who is working on a project looking at what actually happens to women, after peace provisions are put in place, in post-conflict areas. How do women experience the gender provisions, and do they actually work? 

TRANSCRIPT

[Opening theme]

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and welcome back to Peace and Gender. In this podcast, I'm trying to look at different gendered inequalities, meeting the people who are actually seeking solutions and making change, and getting to know both their research and their personal story.

Sarah Hewitt: We've got women's participation in peace processes. We've got these gender provisions being really important to be included in peace agreements. What happens afterwards? What actually happens to women's participation? How are these provisions being implemented?

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: That is Sarah Hewitt. Sarah is a PhD student at Monash University. She focuses on how women's participation in peace processes influences the incorporation of gender provisions in peace agreements.

Sarah Hewitt: You know, if women in the peace process did participate, what happens to their participation after an agreement has been signed? What happens to the networking or the civil society organisations that are included or that are mobilised, informally, around these peace processes?

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: What does really happen after gender provisions are implemented?

Sarah Hewitt: It's important to say, okay, there's been all this attention on why women need to be present and why women need to participate in these forums that are creating these documents. It's also important to say, okay, these documents have been created but what happens to them? How are women interacting with them? How are they deploying these rights? How are they using them? How are they utilising to advance women's rights, to advance their own participation, to advance their own bodily autonomy?

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Sarah is part of a long-term project, which is mapping gender provisions of peace agreements. Sarah is in charge of two countries: Kenya and Nepal. There is a reason why she made this choice.

Sarah Hewitt: The reasons I look at these two countries was because they had a peace process after 2000. They both had peace processes that resulted in really gender-sensitive constitutions. They had these agreements and then they had this constitutional process. Gender provisions, within these constitutions, it brought about increases in women's parliamentary representation, for instance. It kind of made it constitutional that women have equal access to inheritance and equal access to property, which is so important for their economic autonomy, right? For them to be able to decide over their livelihoods. For Nepal, it's the first country in Asia and the Pacific to have a constitutional gender provision protecting sexual minorities.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Before learning more about her project, I wanted to know more about why Sarah started getting involved with international relations and why she's so interested in peace and women's experiences of peace.

Sarah Hewitt: I was born in South Africa and my mum was a journalist in South Africa during the Apartheid era. When she had my older brother, she had to quit her job, because my dad was training to be a surgeon. She had to be - go into that caring role of motherhood. She never got back into journalism, because we moved around a lot for my father's job and we ended up in Tasmania. I think, because of my mum, right? She had been there during that time, where she saw racial and sexual marginalisation at a huge and horrific scale. She would talk about it and they'd have great dinner parties where they'd discuss politics and things like race and gender. From an early age, I was exposed to those kind of social justice ideas, which led me to leave Tasmania and go to university and do a bachelor of arts, majoring in International Relations and Political Science.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: It was kind of because of your mum.

Sarah Hewitt: It was kind of because of my mum. Yeah, for sure.

Andrea Thiis-Evensen: The project that Sarah is a part of, which is called Towards Inclusive Peace: Mapping Gender Provisions of Peace Agreements, is looking at 20 countries.

Although gender provisions are put in place in post-conflict areas, what actually happens to the women after this? The project Sarah is a part of focuses on hearing the stor