De Maio
Women and Conflict Management in West Africa
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displaced persons, the development of early warning mechanisms, and the formation and
management of pressure groups through a cross-section of organizations and civil society
networks. In the paper, I use a case study approach and center my research on the analysis of
women and conflict management in West Africa, particularly in Senegal, Nigeria, and the Mano
River Union countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia.
This paper is divided into four main sections. I begin with a discussion of gendered
theories of war and peace and then cast my analysis of gender roles in Africa in a historical
context. In order to evaluate hypotheses derived from my theoretical arguments, in the third
section I engage in case study analysis of women and conflict management in West Africa.
Finally, I conclude my paper with a discussion of the implications of peace research framed in a
gender context and consider the contribution of women to the prevention and management of
violent conflict.
Gender, War, and Peace
Women do not figure prominently in the conflict resolution literature: the main reason
why women have been absent from the literature is the result of the prevalent belief that peace
processes are “gender neutral” and that they can be no more about women than about men. The
goal of research on gender and conflict management is to reveal the role of gender issues and
values and to analyze the gender-specific consequences of international processes. Looking at
women as a category subsumes the examination of women as international actors, objects, and
victims of male dominance in the international sphere. Such an exercise also investigates why
women have been absent from International Relations more broadly and from discourses about
conflict management in particular.
Convention