The internal drivers of women's post-conflict representation

Despite a substantive expansion in the literature on women's legislative representation in countries emerging from civil conflict, such as conflict trajectories or country characteristics, women's mobilization during conflict has been rather assumed than explored. In this thesis I explore the changes on women's roles during conflict, they ways in which they challenge gender socialization and their effect on women's post-conflict political status. The first paper examines the presence of two contrasting concepts, agency and victimization, and investigates the effect of different types of violence on changes on women's legislative percentage in the first two post-conflict elections. The second paper directs its focus on different types of women's mobilization and ways they transform women to political actors through their direct and indirect challenge of gender relationships. I subsequently examine this mechanism on the short, medium, and long term to assess its magnitude. Building on the results of the first two papers, the third paper focuses solely on women's mobilization in civil society groups and organizations, and employs a willingness and opportunity framework to assess the optimal conditions under which women's mobilization has an effect on women's post-conflict political participation. This dissertation contributes to understanding the the effects of armed violence on women's status during conflict and post-conflict. It shifts the focus to the social processes that take place during armed conflict and the ways they reconfigure social and gender relationships. The theoretical arguments of the three papers are linked through the argument that civil wars are not asocial process but in fact create new social hierarchies that are transferred in the post-conflict society. This thesis also contributes to the literature by affirming the importance of an analysis of war under gender lens.