Empowerment Formation: women’s agency for participation in decision making within the poverty and conflict context case of rural Peru

The focus of this thesis is on the relationship of influences between the individual’s agency and the empirical knowledge of the world within a process of experiencing empowerment. The empowerment formation is the dynamic of the agency transformation where the perceptions of all the affecting forces internally and externally are recognised. The broader context is based on the understanding of the human development and human security approach in order to focus on the centre of the society, the matter of human well-being. The case study chosen for analysis is the rural area in Peru where women’s agency is seen as constrained by the oppression of poverty and repression of conflict. Yet, at the same time these rural women have developed their agency for participation in decision-making in their search for truth and justice. The process of the empowerment formation is explained in terms of the dynamic between agencies: passive agency, survival agency, active agency and conscient (conscious) agency. This thesis is searching for an understanding of how rural women’s agency has been held back from participation in formal decision-making and the approaches are drawn in a case study, the rural women in Peru, in particular quechuans living in the highlands. This thesis is not a conclusive process leading to the solution of the problem found in the thesis, but is intended to highlight the obstacles constantly forming, evolving and transforming the agency for the empowerment formation of rural women living in poverty and conflict. This thesis argues that a hologram perception in which can be seen the wholeness of the agency’s experience permits the interpretation of the disconnections that are formed and which contribute to what extent and why rural women’s empowerment is withheld. As there could be different reasons why women were disadvantaged, it is found here that the answer could lie in each human’s freedom and their relationship with their perceived reality. The analysis of freedom to enhance women’s agency is based on human capabilities which are understood as the environment that enables the ‘doing’ and ‘being’ of any human to develop what they value and have a reason to value within ethical purposes. The lack of freedom in women’s agency triggered by the traumatic experiences while living under inhuman conditions requires consciousness in order for women to come to terms with their reality. The thesis concludes that the development of agency in the empowerment formation needs consciousness capabilities, a mechanism to permit the empowerment formation of the rural women living in poverty and in the aftermath of conflict