In the Pursuit of Ending Cycles of Violence: An Exploration into the Critical Role Local Agency plays for Women Peacebuilders

Peacebuilding projects continue to fall short in reaching their full potential. In order to find more effective approaches to ending cycles of violence locally driven peacebuilding projects are become increasingly popular. Despite the growing practical interest towards this approach, very little is known about the conditions around how to ensure local peacebuilders have what they need for this to occur, and in particular for domestic women peacebuilders. Research is showing in order to build durable peace women are a vital group to meaningfully include, however, they continue to be marginalized, left out all together and or given little agency in peacebuilding work. This thesis contributes to this understudied field by exploring how partnership structures between international peacebuilding actors (IPAs) and domestic women peacebuilders (DWPBs) can affect the level of agency a DWPB has to develop and implement projects that will address most with her local conflict and cultural needs. I conduct a case study analysis of two individual DWPBs, in order to test a theoretical argument linking more equitable partnership structure between IPAs and DWPBs with a DWPBs higher level of agency. The empirical finding give support to the hypotheses tested, as the structure of relationships appears to affect the level of agency a DWPB does have when implementing a peacebuilding project. However, the empirical analysis also points towards other factors that potentially can possibly influence a DWPB’s level of agency