| dc.description.abstract | Ever since the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security in October 2000, this normative framework has spread to a large number of UN member states and quite a few regional organizations. Still, the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda in practice has been painfully slow all over the world. One regional organization that appears to be progressive in its implementation efforts is the African Union (AU). This thesis sets out to explore how the African Union has worked, and is working, in implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Since the agenda encompasses a wide range of issues, I have chosen to pay special attention to the participation of women in peace processes, as the progress on this has been minimal. Using implementation theory, I identify five possible explanatory factors which are applied to the AU’s work on the implementation of Women, Peace and Security. By doing so, I aim to test the implementation theory, which was originally developed in another policy area, to see if it is applicable also to the peace and security policy area. It is also used to identify the challenges faced by the AU in the implementation process. Through multiple sources, such as formal documents and elite interviews, this study finds that while the AU has made considerable progress in adopting policies on Women, Peace and Security, there is still a massive gap between policy and practice. Some of the theoretical concepts are helpful in understanding the challenges to the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, such as the lack of monitoring mechanisms and shortage of capacity, while other factors set forth in the implementation theory prove to not be so relevant, such as the legal status of the agreements. Instead, additional explanatory factors were identified as challenging to the implementation process, such as lack of coordination and the social and cultural context. | eng |