| dc.description.abstract | Women’s political empowerment is central for states to advance gender equality and to move toward peace following armed conflicts. Recent research has directed attention to the relationship between gender provisions within peace agreements and the improvement of women’s political rights, finding positive and significant effects of gender provisions on post-conflict women’s political empowerment. However, questions remain in this relationship when considering the specific types of gender provisions. Therefore, this thesis set out to investigate the varying impacts, if any, of the eleven categories of gender provisions on post-conflict women’s political rights advancement. Particularly, the following categories were hypothesized to have more potent influences on the improvement of women’s political empowerment than the other categories: gender provisions mentioning women’s participation in governance and decision-making bodies, equality, and institutional reform. Ordinary Least Squares regressions with panel correlated standard errors were conducted using data from the Women Political Empowerment Index and PA-X Peace Agreement Database. The results show that only specific types of gender provisions, namely gender-sensitive equality and institutional reform provisions, significantly improve women’s political rights after armed conflicts. The analyses provide strong evidence that including gender provisions within peace agreements is essential to improve women’s political rights; however, the contents of gender provisions matter. Additionally, the findings serve as a powerful voice in support of the efforts of the UN and the international community for more gender-inclusive peace processes, particularly peace agreements. It can be argued that gender provisions are better treated as distinguished categories in both research and practice. | eng |