The Impact of Women in Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding

When a war breaks out, the people negotiating its end at the official table are almost always men. Yet the people holding families together, organising food and shelter, and quietly reaching across enemy lines are very often women. This gap between who builds peace on the ground and who gets credited for it at the negotiating table sits at the heart of the field known as Women, Peace, and Security. Understanding this gap, and the global effort to close it, helps explain why so many peace deals collapse within a few years and why others manage to last.

Why women experience and resist conflict differently 🔗

Conflict does not affect everyone equally. Women and girls are disproportionately harmed by violent conflict, facing displacement, the collapse of household economies, and targeted sexual violence used as a weapon of war. But the same upheaval also pushes women into new roles. When male family members are killed, imprisoned, or recruited into armed groups, women become the primary providers and decision-makers for entire communities.

This lived experience gives women a distinct stake in ending violence. Because they are rarely the commanders of armed groups, they are often seen as more neutral and trustworthy go-betweens. They tend to frame peace not as a political victory for one side but as a practical necessity for the survival of children and communities. This is why women’s peace work frequently begins long before any official ceasefire, in the form of negotiating the day-to-day survival of their neighbourhoods.

Women as frontline peacebuilders 🔗

Much of the most effective peace work happens informally, away from cameras and official delegations. A study of informal peace efforts found that in roughly three out of four cases, women’s groups were actively involved in pushing dialogue forward. These women open back channels between hostile parties, build trust where official negotiators cannot, and keep conversations alive when formal talks break down.

The Naga Mothers’ Association in Nagaland 🔗

One of the clearest examples comes from Northeast India. The Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA) was formed in 1984 in Kohima, at a time when insurgency, factional killings, alcoholism, and drug addiction were tearing at Naga society. The organisation brought together the women’s wings of different Naga ethnic groups under one umbrella, deliberately using the cultural dignity attached to motherhood as a shared identity that could cut across factional lines.

Their most influential intervention was the “Shed No More Blood” campaign, launched in the mid-1990s as fratricidal killings between rival Naga groups escalated. Rather than taking sides, the NMA formed a peace team and initiated peaceful dialogue with various underground groups, positioning mothers as mourners of all the dead, regardless of which faction the deceased belonged to. This maternal framing made it harder for armed groups to dismiss them and gave the women moral authority that political actors lacked.

The NMA’s reach extended well beyond mediation. The group has run a detoxification and counselling centre in Kohima, mediated disputes between the state government and student bodies, and reached out across ethnic lines during crises in neighbouring Manipur. In 2016, for instance, the NMA worked to resolve an economic blockade in Manipur’s hills, stepping in where state machinery had failed. In doing so, they carved out political space for women in a society where female participation in electoral politics remains strikingly low.

The Jerusalem Link between Israeli and Palestinian women 🔗

A second example shows women bridging one of the world’s most intractable divides. In 1989, prominent Israeli and Palestinian women peace activists met in Brussels, beginning a dialogue that in 1994 produced the Jerusalem Link. This was a coordinated partnership between two separate women’s organisations: Bat Shalom on the Israeli side and the Jerusalem Center for Women on the Palestinian side.

The structure was deliberate. Each organisation kept its independence and its own national identity, but they worked together toward shared goals. Forming in the period around the Oslo peace process, the Link’s aim was to build a culture of peace and cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians. Its agenda combined feminist demands, such as women’s participation in peace negotiations and equality, with broader calls for ending occupation and recognising the right to self-determination for both peoples.

The Jerusalem Link demonstrated both the power and the fragility of such cross-conflict alliances. It eventually sought international backing, linking up with the United Nations Development Fund for Women to help create an International Women’s Commission. Yet sustaining feminist peace movements amid ongoing occupation and recurring wars proved extremely difficult, and the model has had to be rebuilt by later movements. The same spirit reappeared in 2023 when the Israeli movement Women Wage Peace and the Palestinian movement Women of the Sun gathered thousands of women near Jerusalem and the Dead Sea to demand a return to negotiations, just days before renewed conflict erupted.

The persistent exclusion from formal peace tables 🔗

Despite this track record, women are routinely shut out of the official negotiations that formally end wars. The numbers are stark. According to data gathered by UN Women, in 2024 women made up only 7 per cent of negotiators and 14 per cent of mediators in formal peace processes worldwide, and many peace talks included no women at all.

The exclusion runs deeper than headcounts. A recurring criticism is that those who ignite wars are invited to the table, while those working for genuine peace, such as women’s groups, are pushed aside. Even where women are present, their roles can be more symbolic than substantive. The United Nations notes that women’s official participation is often temporary and that their capacity to influence outcomes may be actively resisted by local cultural norms.

This matters because the evidence strongly suggests that excluding women produces weaker, shorter-lived agreements.

Why women’s participation makes peace last 🔗

The case for inclusion is not just about fairness; it is also about effectiveness. A landmark analysis of peace processes since the end of the Cold War found that women’s participation increases the probability of an agreement lasting at least two years by 20 per cent, and lasting fifteen years by 35 per cent. Peace agreements signed with women as signatories also show higher rates of implementation.

There are several reasons for this. Women involved in negotiations tend to broaden the agenda beyond power-sharing between armed groups, raising issues such as health, education, displacement, and community reconciliation that determine whether peace actually holds in daily life. Their grassroots networks also help carry an agreement from paper into practice. A peace deal negotiated only among combatants often ignores the social repair work that prevents a return to violence; women’s participation tends to build that repair work into the deal itself.

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 🔗

The global framework that put these ideas into international law is UN Security Council Resolution 1325, adopted unanimously on 31 October 2000. It was the first time the Security Council formally recognised the specific impact of armed conflict on women and acknowledged the critical role women already play in preventing and resolving conflict.

The resolution rests on a few core commitments. It calls for increasing women’s participation in decision-making at all levels of conflict prevention and peace negotiations, with particular attention to supporting local women’s peace initiatives. It also demands the protection of women and girls from sexual and gender-based violence in conflict and an end to impunity for such crimes. Over the following years, 1325 grew into the broader Women, Peace, and Security agenda, reinforced by a series of follow-up resolutions and translated by individual countries into National Action Plans.

The gap between principle and practice 🔗

Resolution 1325 transformed the language of peacemaking, but implementation has lagged badly behind its ambition. Much of the Security Council’s actual work on the agenda has emphasised protecting women rather than ensuring their participation. As the falling proportion of women negotiators shows, the normative foundation is now the strongest it has ever been, yet the practice on the ground has not kept pace. Critics also point out that many National Action Plans suffer from weak budgets, poor coordination, and inconsistent monitoring, leaving strong commitments largely on paper.

This is precisely why grassroots efforts like the Naga Mothers’ Association and the Jerusalem Link remain so important. They show that the participation 1325 calls for is not a hopeful theory but a demonstrated reality, achieved by women who built peace without waiting for an official invitation. The challenge now is closing the distance between what these women have already proven possible and the formal structures that continue to leave them out.

What do you think? If informal peacebuilding led by women is so often effective, what concrete steps could governments take to carry that influence into formal negotiations? And in deeply patriarchal conflict zones, can cultural identities like motherhood be a lasting source of political power for women, or only a temporary entry point?

References

1. https://www.usip.org/gender_peacebuilding/about_UNSCR_1325
2. https://wunrn.com/2025/09/women-peace-security-facts-figures/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naga_Mothers'_Association
4. https://feminisminindia.com/2022/04/05/naga-mothers-association-the-role-of-the-mothers-of-nagaland-in-peace-keeping/
5. https://scroll.in/article/943445/the-mothers-of-nagaland-are-taking-it-upon-themselves-to-keep-the-peace-yet-again
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Shalom
7. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/peace-movements-in-israel
8. https://time.com/6691522/yael-admi-reem-hajajreh/
9. https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/facts-and-figures/facts-and-figures-women-peace-and-security
10. https://wps.unwomen.org/participation/
11. https://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/wps/
12. https://www.unwomen.org/en/docs/2000/10/un-security-council-resolution-1325
13. https://www.wilpf.org/10-things-you-need-to-know-about-women-peace-and-security/