Are peace agreements more likely to include gender provisions if women participate in the peace negotiations? The international community, national governments and civil societies around the world have assumed that women’s inclusion in peace negotiations result in higher quality peace agreements, where women’s interests are better taken into consideration. To date, there is a lack of empirical underpinning of the assumption. This study uses a twofold research design, combining statistical and qualitative methods to examine the interrelation between women’s descriptive and substantive representation in peace negotiations in the post-Cold War era. First, the statistical analysis suggests that peace agreements are more likely to include at least one gender provision referring to women’s rights and security if women participate in the negotiation. At the same time, the agreements are not more likely to address a higher number of different areas for increased rights and security measures for women. Second, the qualitative analysis examining the mechanisms shows that there is no guarantee that women will push for gender provisions, but that their particular experiences and interests in conflict, and the expectations from others give them strong reasons to do so. Important factors for women to successfully push for gender provisions have to do both with their individual will and personal ability, and external factors relating to the presence of traditional gender norms and the power balance between men and women in the country of conflict.

The correlation between food insecurity and conflict has previously been studied and established in multiple studies. Furthermore, additional research has found linkages allying increased levels of female political participation and the de-escalation of conflict. Despite these facts, there are to date no studies examining whether female inclusion in peace processes has an effect on hunger. Thus, this dissertation addresses the relationship between female signatories’ presence in peace processes and food insecurity. Food insecurity is operationalized as prevalence of undernourishment, and female inclusion in peace negotiations is measured by the presence of female signatories in such processes. The study’s main conceptual claim is based on gaps found in previous literature, and argues that a higher level of female participants in peace processes leads to a lower level of food insecurity. The claim is evaluated in a quantitative statistical analysis, using data on food insecurity from the FAOSTAT Data for Food Security Indicators​, and incorporating statistics on female inclusion in peace negotiations from the ​Replication Data for Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations and the Durability of Peace​. The analysis illustrates food insecurity’s dissemination in post-conflict societies and gender dispersals within peace negotiations, in order to demonstrate an existing correlation. Built on results from an ordinary least squares regression, the study confirms that higher presence of female signatories in peace processes decreases the likelihood of food insecurity in post-conflict societies.