Gender, justice and deliberation:why women don’t influence peace-making

Scholars have pinpointed that women’s underrepresentation in peace-making results in gendered outcomes that do not address women’s needs and interests. Despite recent increased representation at the negotiating table, women still have a limited influence on peace-making outcomes. We propose that differences in female and male speeches reflected in the gendered patterns in discourse during peacemaking explain how women’s influence is curtailed. We examine women’s speaking behavior in transitional justice debates in the post-conflict Balkans. Applying multimethod quantitative text analysis to over half a million words in multiple languages, we analyze structural and thematic speech patterns. We find that men’s domination of turn-taking and the absence of topics reflecting women’s needs and interests lead to a gendered outcome; the sequences of men talking after men are longer than those of women talking after women, which restricts women’s deliberative space and opportunities to develop and sustain arguments that reflect their concerns. We find no evidence that women’s limited influence is driven by lower deliberative quality of their speeches. This study of gendered dynamics at the micro-level of discourse identifies a novel dimension of male domination during peace-making.