Women in Peace Talks: Lessons Learned from Mali

It draws on extensive interviews under- taken between 2021 and 2023 with women representatives and male leaders of the three signatory parties to the APR accord, civil society, and the international Mediation Team; it also aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarly literature and policy analysis on women’s participation in peace processes in the wake of United Nations Security Council (UN. [...] The idea for a quota of women in the APR process emerged in 2020, when hundreds of women leaders from across the country, including representatives of the signatory parties and prominent members of civil society, gathered in Bamako to discuss the Agreement and ways to integrate women into its mechanisms. [...] Some of the women representatives continue to play active roles in war- making and informal mediation, while the collapse of the peace talks relegated others to the side-lines.10 8 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2480 (2019) - The Situation in Mali. [...] Going Against Type Beyond the challenges posed by frictions between domestic and external perspectives and approaches, a second lesson relates to how the women who did join the process, in the short-term at least, defied expectations of the positions they would promote in the APR pro- cess. [...] At the time, the Mediation Team noted that the women’s prioritisation of communities’ needs set the discussions on a new trajectory.12 In other words, women were able to redirect the focus of conversations without explicitly invoking gender, at least in the short-term.