Ayelet Harel

This chapter explores the practical and theoretical significance and long-term consequences of the failure to incorporate women’s interests in postconflict negotiations. Gendered analysis of ethnic conflicts and ethnic conflict resolution demands a reorientation of the concepts of conflict and security. Questions that must be considered include the following: whose conflict is being solved and who is being secured? Feminist studies compel scholars to explore women’s agency and women’s voices in world politics and global conflicts, adding heretofore missing dimensions and missing actors in the study of intractable conflicts. I argue that a consideration of the gendered aspects of intractable conflicts and ethnic conflict resolution is crucial to the understanding of ethnic conflicts—from their beginnings through their evolution and extending to their resolution. Therefore, to demonstrate the significance of the absence of women’s interests, particularly those of minority women, from conflict analysis and the postconflict negotiations over rights, I analyze the status of Muslim women in the postindependence environment of India.