Engendered Peace Processes and Women’s Political Participation: Lessons from Colombia
The Colombian armed conflict has been the longest civil war in the Western Hemisphere, lasting over fifty years and leaving almost 9,237,000 victims. The conflict between the state and guerrilla groups, including the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), reached an inflection point in 2012, after the beginning of the government’s peace negotiations with FARC. This process led to FARC and the Colombian government signing a Final Peace Agreement in 2016. The Peace Agreement has been recognized around the globe as a benchmark for gender mainstreaming in peace processes. This recognition stems first from the participation of women and their organizations in the negotiations and, second, from the incorporation of gender provisions in all aspects of the Agreement. The Peace Agreement thus represents a commitment of the Colombian State to the political, social, and economic empowerment of women, and to closing the gender gap between men and women.
Colombia’s peace process is thus hailed as an effort towards an “engendered” peace, referring to its commitment to equal rights for men and women, the recognition of the special circumstances women faced during the conflict, and even more to the standard of mainstreaming gender in all parts of the agreement. Because of this, in the Women’s Rights After War project, we explore the multifaceted relationship between the lives of women, the legal and institutional reforms resulting from the peace process, and the conflict itself. In this piece, I outline the preliminary findings of our ongoing research in Colombia since the Peace Agreement of November 2016, with a focus on the election of women to political office through the implementation of the gender quota.
I argue that after six years of implementing the Peace Agreement, there are several persistent challenges regarding women’s political empowerment that serve to undermine gender equality as well as the quality of the post-war peace. These challenges manifest both in the number of women elected, who is elected, and the striking absence of inclusive feminist policies in the quota’s implementation. Drawing on my research in six municipalities with divergent experiences of conflict, I demonstrate both the instrumentalization of women through the implementation of the gender quota, as well as the political violence women faced as backlash to these reforms. My research demonstrates that the gender reforms put in place in the context of the peace agreement have not been as disruptive to the war-affected state as their advocates had hoped. In fact, we see that women’s political participation is frequently determined by, and reinforcing of, pre-war and conflict-era structures of power. The continuities we observe hint that some of the underlying structural causes of the armed conflict, rooted in unequal social power relations and political capture by traditional parties and elites, remain unattended.
I trace how the same traditional families and parties that controlled the political landscape during the country’s fifty-year armed conflict continue to dominate today, controlling women’s access to electoral politics through three channels. Traditional parties and elites elevate internally-affiliated women in order to advance their own political and economic agendas, often as a continuation of their interests during the armed conflict; purchase the loyalties of other women seeking to enter electoral politics in pursuit of the same; and intimidate, harass, and deter external candidates with alternative visions of politics. The result is that women entering politics through the quota system represent an extension of the political and economic interests that prevailed throughout the war.
In the following sections, I first introduce the shortcomings of legal and institutional norms in effectively increasing the number of women in elected decision-making positions, highlighting the gaps that remain. I then explore how women participate in politics, summarizing our analysis of women’s political participation in six Colombian municipalities. I highlight the political dynamics that shape women’s political participation, such as maintaining patronage, elite capture, corruption, and the enduring power of status quo interests. I show how patterns of democratic electoral politics since the conclusion of the war, instrumentalized by traditional party elites, extend rather than disrupt conflictera dynamics.
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