Women's participation in the Bougainville peace process and post-conflict political order: Understanding post-conflict gender norm shift on the level of local government

Abstract

Conflicts and the following time of resolution may be simultaneously empowering and disempowering for women. The recent history of Bougainville (Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea) is such a case, providing an opportunity to examine the participation of women in the Bougainville peace process and its post-conflict political order. I explore in my PhD-project women’s role in local government to see if a societal shift of gender relations and identities can be found in Bougainville’s local institutions, or if the changes occurred are different expressions of gender relations which remain equally rooted in previous gender roles.

About the speaker

Antje [Anita] Busch, M.A. studied Political Science and English Studies in Germany, the USA and Spain, and holds a Bachelor and Master degree from the RWTH Aachen University (Germany). Since 2014 she works as a researcher and lecturer for the Chair of International Relations at RWTH Aachen University Department for Political Science. Her PhD-project is about women’s participation in the Bougainville peace process and post-conflict political order. For that she plans to conduct semi-structure interview with women’s representatives on the local government level in north and central Bougainville from April until June 2018. She is the Junior Speaker for the Development Politics and Theory Section of the German’s Association of Political Scientist and Speaker of the Researcher’s Colloquium at her department.