Editorial: Gender, Conflict and Political Settlements

This Special Issue draws together findings and analysis from the gender theme of the Political Settlements Research Programme (PSRP). PSRP has been a four-year research programme made up of an academic/practitioner, north/south consortium, led by the Global Justice Academy at the University of Edinburgh.(1) The programme set out to investigate how peace processes attempt to revise political settlements to make them more inclusive, so as to end violent conflict. In particular we were interested in forms of ‘horizontal’ inclusion between political and military leaders who have been former opponents, and forms of ‘vertical’ inclusion between rulers (often in the form of new power-sharing coalitions) and the ruled (wider social groups and individuals). The PSRP gender theme focused on uncovering the gender dynamics of political settlements through a series of discrete research projects, as well as through maintaining gender as a cross-cutting research interest. As the programme draws to a close, this Special Issue aims to distil and convey the key general propositions on gender and inclusion discovered through PSRP research.