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This article investigates how the transition from violent conflict to peaceful political settlement has shaped intimate partner violence (IPV) in Northern Ireland focusing on three issues, which are policing, paramilitarism, and firearms. It does so on the basis of comparative analysis of interview findings with more than 100 women victims of IPV from across Northern Ireland conducted at two junctures: first in 1992 during a period of violent conflict, and later in 2016 at a time of enduring peace. The findings trace the changes that have occurred across these areas and highlight any problems that remain in the post-conflict environment.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a global phenomenon, but it is shaped by the socio-political and cultural factors that exist within a given society. A key factor shaping IPV is the presence of violent conflict, although empirical research on the precise ways in which IPV and conflict connect has been scarce. Drawing on a Northern Ireland case study, this briefing paper seeks to address this gap by investigating how the transition from violent conflict to peaceful political settlement has shaped experiences of and responses to IPV. More specifically, the research investigates changes across three key areas, namely policing, paramilitarism and firearms. It does so on the basis of findings from more than 100 in-depth semi-structured interviews with women victims of IPV from across Northern Ireland conducted at two junctures; first in 1992 during a period of protracted violent conflict, and more recently in 2016 at a time of enduring peace. The findings trace the changes that have occurred across each of these areas and highlight the problems that remain in the post-conflict environment. The policy implications of these findings for political settlements are outlined below. The research contributes to better understanding of how IPV shapes women’s participation in peace processes, and how peace processes can re-shape violence beyond the conflict in ways that enable the fuller participation of women.

Women’s activism played an important role in conflict transformation in Northern Ireland, from the early civil rights activists to the development of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition political party. This chapter follows the history of activism in Northern Ireland, using the trajectory to illustrate how the exclusion of women from formal institutions resulted in a women’s movement that became an alternative means for creating change. It identifies important characteristics of women’s activism, including a willingness to build broad alliances in civil society and framing tactics that brought gender-specific interests to the peace process and the Good Friday peace agreement. As the chapter examines the successes and challenges of the post-conflict women’s movement in Northern Ireland, it reflects on the power of creativity and innovation in altering institutional dynamics during times of transition.

Where violence and conflict have become the norm, negotiating an agreement built on peace and justice can be a challenging prospect for those involved. Since 2000, with the introduction of Security Council Resolutions on women, peace, and security, the United Nations has asserted that the environment enabling peace agreements become more inclusive of women and that gender perspectives be taken into account throughout the peace building process. This chapter draws on examples from the Northern Ireland peace process to show the changes that took place when a group of women moved out of the political activism of civic society to become engaged in the more formal politics of peace negotiations. The women activists grasped the opportunities of the “constitutional moment” to frame gender-specific interests within the new constitutional framework of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. They built on skills honed through years of activism to form the Women’s Coalition, a political party that was involved in the multi-party peace negotiations, and became signatories to the peace agreement. However, in the transitional space that opens up following a peace agreement, what gets resourced and implemented often falls short of what was promised. Despite its success in the negotiating process, enforcing the proposals on women’s interests in the aftermath proved to be the most difficult task. Where a democratic deficit exists, with women continuing to be excluded from political participation, those who have struggled to build a new society will ask for whom was the reconstruction meant. For a genuinely transformative process to take place, women’s interests must not be left in the “aspirational/to do” list but instead form a central part of the “constitutional” and legislative guarantees for the new society.

Over the last three decades, sexual violence against women in intimate partner relationships has become a global health issue. The development of a human rights perspective on the phenomenon has been more recent. Assessing the prevalence of coercive sex in the context of intimate relationships — and marital rape in particular — is challenging for many reasons. Sexual violence is highly stigmatized and is among the few crimes in which the victim might also be blamed for the harm experienced.Despite that historical baggage, a discernible shift in human rights protections is now emerging, emanating from the specialist human rights treaty regimes. These shifts have potentially significant consequence by delineating the harms women experience and seeking accountability for them. The first part of this chapter addresses the institutional structures of human rights protection, including human rights treaty law and practice. The second part examines the specialist treaty addressing women’s rights under international law, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the challenges that addressing violence against women has encountered in this area. The chapter concludes with an overview of the European and inter-American human rights treaty systems, where some of the most innovative judicial developments have been taking place in recent years. By drawing on recent jurisprudence from the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the chapter demonstrates how this important human rights initiative influenced the changes now in place. Despite these changes, weaknesses and limitations of the human rights system (and law more broadly) in addressing violent harm to women still remain. Legal acknowledgment and redress are only one (albeit important) dimension of an engaged policy and structural response to violence.

While recent years have seen a much greater engagement with the issue of gender in transitional justice, women nevertheless remain vulnerable to marginalization in transitional processes. It is often assumed that women are prepared for the demands of politics, with little thought given to training and capacity building for what is traditionally an underrepresented group in national politics. This paper reflects on training that was facilitated by the authors for a group of Syrian women in late 2012. The training focused on practical skills in mediation and negotiation, and was based on the premise that if women’s participation in peace negotiations is to be effective, skills and capacity need to be addressed before rather than during or after a transition.

Synopsis Given that women consistently receive less attention than men in peace building and that gender analysis rarely informs strategies related to conflict transformation, this article examines how a European Union (EU) PEACE III project, titled Women and Peacebuilding: Sharing the Learning, addresses this gap. It challenges the hierarchal nature of the dialogue on peace building in a post conflict society and suggests how this can be changed. It shows how activists and policy-makers can become more engaged around UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and argues that if government officials had adopted a more contextualised, bottom–up system of policy making, they could have engendered social transformation within the broader processes of post-conflict transition. 1 The project's findings are framed within the context of the dominant discourses on peace and security and should be relevant to those engaged in the implementation of UNSCR 1325 in other post conflict societies.

Despite a growing awareness of the universality of intimate partner violence and its recognition as a human rights violation, much less is known about the dynamics, as well as the specific forms and regulation of this violence in conflict and post conflict settings. While substantial legal consideration has been given to sexual violence occurring during armed conflict in recent decades, specifically to rape, arguably a concentration on high-profile extraordinary violence has obscured attention from the regular violence that women routinely experience in conflict and post-conflict societies. Our knowledge gap limits what we understand generally about the multidimensional complexities of intimate violence in conflict settings. It also obscures the relationship between various categories of gender-based violence, and the ways in which certain forms and practices of violence reinforce and sustain others. Based on unique empirical data from the thirty year long conflict in Northern Ireland this article examines the relationship between intimate and conflict related violence, with a particular emphasis on exploring the forms and modalities of intimate violence occurring alongside armed conflict or extensive communal violence. We analyze the way in which state and non-state actors are positioned to such violence, the complimentary masculinities that are distinguishable between diametrically positioned groups, while underscoring the effects on legal accountability by the parallel realities of societal dysfunction. The conclusion points to the need for a denser and integrated analysis of violence against women in conflicted societies

Despite the high degree of interest in inequality between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, public policy and academic debates alike have focused largely on men's employment and unemployment. The paper suggests a number of reasons for this and analyses the nature of gender segregation in the Northern Ireland labour market, identifying the differences in the employment position of Catholic and Protestant women. Clear contrasts in the labour market position of the two sets of women with respect to unemployment are also demonstrated. The paper makes reference to certain alternatives to conventional measures of participation and underlines the importance of adjusting industrial and occupational categories so as better to reveal the patterns of women's employment. In Britain as a whole, there is increasing interest in a reconceptualisation of women's employment in order to acknowledge and to integrate more fully the specific experience of diverse groups. It is equally important for Northern Ireland, where debates about the changing labour market can all too easily proceed without reference to women at all.

This essay outlines the implications for abused women and children living in a society dominated by a high level of social disruption and examines the various responses to domestic violence when it occurs in the midst of political violence. Attention is focused on whether or not there are any special problems encountered in such a situation and whether these have particular implications for women elsewhere. Using Northern Ireland as one example, the essay explores the social conditions impacting at the familial, community, and state level and assesses the extent to which these provide a pervasive and interactive system for legitimizing domestic violence.

This article employs data gathered in Lebanon, Northern Ireland and South Africa as part of a project entitled ‘Re-Imagining Women's Security and Participation in Post-Conflict Societies’. It refl ects on three different ‘imaginings’ of security–the state security discourse, the human security discourse and a gendered security approach–with the aim of showing that security discourses are currently undergoing a process of transition which parallels that taking place in post-conflict societies around the world. The article is particularly concerned to explore how a gendered security approach might empower women to re-imagine security in contextualised, bottom-up ways, and advocate social transformation within the broader processes of post-conflict transition. In order to consider women's demands for security policies and approaches in the twenty-fi rst century, the article explores the direct testimony of women in three post-conflict societies, with specifi c reference to three key areas of security central to women's re-imaginings of the concept.

The Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC) was created out of the frustrations and aspirations of women from a diverse range of backgrounds and affiliations. The majority of these women had been, for many years, concerned about the exclusion of women from mainstream politics in Northern Ireland. All of them hoped that the opportunity to create a lasting peace would not be wasted and believed that women had particular experiences and insights which could help to move the process forward. Within weeks of its foundation in April 1996 the Coalition had achieved an historic success: the election of two of its members to the Northern Ireland Peace Talks table. In this chapter, we describe the origins of this almost unique party and discuss the ways in which its distinctive and new values and methods of organising were constructed. Its interventions in the mainstream of politics will be discussed, as will some of the responses from the established parties. A central theme will be the dialogues among women from the unionist, nationalist and other traditions and affiliations within the Coalition.

There is a well-developed body of literature on the subject of domestic violence and the societal constraints facing abused women. There has, however, been less examination of the interrelationship between violence against women in the home and the political violence occurring in the wider society. This was one of the issues studied in a recent research set in Northern Ireland before the ceasefire. Here we will discuss the implications for abused women and children living in a society, such as Northern Ireland, which has been dominated by a high level of political conflict. It will also examine the state response to such abuse occurring in the midst of that conflict. Raising the issue of domestic violence is problematic when it is considered to be a distraction from the policing of other forms of violence in what has been one of Europe’s longest running political conflicts. When violence occurs in the more private domestic arena of the family home and when the society also happens to be a more traditional, religious oriented one then further constraints can exist in recognising domestic violence as a serious problem.