Our Search for Peace: Women in South Sudan’s National Peace Processes, 2005–2018

Overview

South Sudanese women have played critical roles in efforts to achieve peace in South Sudan, yet their contributions have been under-recognized and under-documented. This paper contributes to remedying this by sharing women’s stories of their roles in peacemaking through the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (2005), the Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (2015) and the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (2018). It utilizes the ‘Broadening Participation’ framework, developed by Thania Paffenholz, to compare various modalities of participation, and contributes to critical discussions about factors that have contributed to, and hindered, women’s meaningful participation in building peace in South Sudan. This report is accompanied by a companion policy paper, Born to Lead: Recommendations on increasing women’s participation in South Sudan’s peace process.