Considering Bargaining Power—Women at the Table but with what Leverage?
In this blog, Alex McAuliff considers the role of bargaining power in peace negotiations. She asks what leverage women have to achieve their desired outcomes when they are included in these highly masculinised processes? Specifically, this blog examines the power available to the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC) within the peace negotiations that led to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The analysis is drawn from extensive archival work and interviews with NIWC members as well as Irish and British government officials involved in the design and execution of the negotiations. This blog is part of Alex’s broader research project examining the ways gendered hierarchies of peace, shape the effectiveness of descriptive representation to achieve gender-just and transformative peace outcomes.
Feminist international relations and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) literatures have offered essential insights into the connections between gender, war, and peace, and specifically, the challenges and opportunities for women’s inclusion in every stage of peace processes. With regard to negotiations specifically, there echoes a seemingly continuous drumbeat advocating ‘inclusion, inclusion, inclusion.’ Descriptive representation—the presence of women in decision-making bodies—is a vital aspect of equitable processes and outcomes. However, rather than the foundational step from which we build, inclusion has become the destination—just get women included and the presumed benefits will flow from there. This emphasis is understandable given the relative lack of progress in just getting women to the table. Yet, treating inclusion as the end goal has many problematic outcomes. As I have written elsewhere, not only does it situate women as the problem to be fixed, normalising the masculinised standard of the process, it also rests the burden of change and impactful outcomes exclusively on the shoulders of women, presuming that the most marginalised in the process will have the ability to fundamentally alter the established negotiation dynamics. Crucially, it shrouds the power dynamics of the process behind a veil of assumed equality, whereby once at the table, participants are presumed to be on level playing ground. To focus exclusively on inclusion renders a fundamentally impoverished understanding of the intersections of gender and power within peace negotiations.
Instead, the implications of inclusion must be understood within the gendered context of negotiations and the specific characteristics and facets that inform such a process. Bargaining power and leverage are two aspects fundamental to negotiations and their outcomes. Putting aside the problematic assumption that all women would necessarily advocate for a certain set of gender sensitive outcomes, we cannot understand the ability of women to achieve certain outcomes without attention to the dimensions of power and their operation within negotiations.
The Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC), which participated in the Northern Irish peace negotiations between 1996 and 1998, provides an opportune example to examine this phenomenon. While there were a handful of women who participated in the talks, scattered across the more traditional political parties, the Women’s Coalition was organised explicitly on behalf of women, with party positions unambiguously attentive to the ways gender shapes men and women’s experiences of public policy, governance, and peace outcomes. Therefore, their position within the talks could arguably be considered one of the stronger positions women can occupy with regard to peace negotiations—they were there as part of a collective with specific gender-oriented intentions and an (albeit small) electoral mandate. Yet what power did they actually have?
Poster used by NIWC in electoral campaign.
According to Roger Fisher “negotiating power is the ability to influence others.” A key concept when considering one’s negotiating power is a party’s BATNA, their Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. In other words, if an agreement is not reached, or indeed a party does not receive sufficient concessions to their liking, what are their alternatives to achieving their desired outcomes? For a group like the Women’s Coalition there are few good alternatives.
One member of the NIWC jokingly summed up their negotiating position as, “We didn’t have a paramilitary wing.” In processes that tend to be highly militarised, the leverage garnered through the simple threat to return to violence is hefty. Women’s groups and civil society more broadly rarely have this source at their disposal. While recognising the contributions of the Women’s Coalition, a government official who was intimately involved in the talks put the reality bluntly, “Ultimately we knew the Women’s Coalition would go along with whatever consensus was emerging.” In other words, if they walked, no one going to come chasing after them. In terms of negotiation and leverage, this put them in a very difficult position to achieve their own goals of social, economic, and political gender provisions. (It is also worth noting, however, that their prioritised issues went beyond explicit gender provisions, recognising the broader societal implications of conflict and its drivers and consequences that are so often ignored by securitised process of peace negotiations.) Aware of the limitations of their negotiating position, the NIWC built leverage and power through alternate means to shape the process and ultimately ensure an agreement was achieved. Three types of leverage that they wielded are detailed here:
1. Relational Leverage – One of the most well-known elements of the Coalition’s negotiation performance is their commitment to building relationships. They talked to everyone. The importance of this approach in a context where party positions had long ago ossified and dialogue had ground to a state of complete paralysis was immense. The NIWC’s tactic helped fracture the overly rehearsed laments of the other parties. By entering the conversations from a slightly different perspective, they forced actors to pause and consider rather than reverting to lobbing the same, decades old points, back and forth. By refusing to conform to standard operating procedures of the so-called “tribal” politics, the Coalition could introduce a different kind of conversation. Moreover, because of the close relationships they cultivated, the NIWC knew the interests informing the positions of the hardline parties. They knew where there was room to press for more and when the threats to leave the process were genuine. In doing so, they made themselves indispensable to the British and Irish governments, as well as to the chair of the process, as a trusted source of intelligence, helping to crack open seemingly deadlocked situations.
2. Informational Leverage – The “common sense party” was a phrase oft applied by government officials to describe the Coalition’s role, citing their ability to bring parties back to the issues that shouldn’t divide them. However, they didn’t simply offer suggestions, they wrote it into existence. The impressive drafting abilities of the Coalition were widely referenced by party members as well as government officials. They authored position papers on every topic, every issue. As Monica McWilliams articulated “You know what the secret was? We were drafting. None of the others were drafting. They were coming up with ideas and then leaving it to the keeper of the pen and the two governments. We were writing it.” Although they had little capacity to control the ultimate outcome, by drafting and providing language, they could give shape to the contours of the discussions. Indeed, simply by writing it in is precisely how they managed to get reference to integrated education into the final text.
3. Procedural Leverage –The Women’s Coalition was not just disadvantaged as a women’s party in the process, they were also a mathematically small party. In this regard, however, they were not alone, joined by three other parties of small numerical standing. They were strong advocates of transparency, proper procedure, fairness, and inclusion and leveraged the legitimacy of the process to enhance the position of all the smaller parties. One of the critical procedural changes they advocated was an additional dimension to sufficient consensus—the method whereby agreement among parties would be reached. Initially, the consensus process would have required agreement only of the British and Irish governments and enough support from the political parties that when taken together represented a majority of the electorate and a majority of the two communities. In practice, this meant only agreement between the governments and the biggest party on either side would be required, rendering the other parties around the table largely dispensable to the process. The Coalition, specifically, Bronagh Hinds, advocated a change that would also require the approval of the majority of parties present in the talks, ensuring the smaller parties would still have a critical role to play in decision-making.
4. Moral Leverage—The Coalition was often described as the “conscious of the process.” Not only were they deeply connected to civil society and the grassroots perspective, the NIWC were willing to “air the dirty laundry” of the negotiations. Though the party had initially been greeted with healthy dose of skepticism, over the course of the talks, the public had seen their treatment, particularly the horrific misogyny hurled in their direction. Their fortitude and perseverance in the face of this abuse, combined with their commitment to problem-solving, inclusion, and dialogue, had gained them a certain level of credibility among the public. Therefore, they had the public legitimacy to say “actually we would have a deal but for the behaviour of party X,” constituting, according to government officials, a significant constraint on the bigger, more intransigent parties. Moreover, their moral authority positioned them as a signalling devise to the public. As one official explained, “If they had withheld their support, my goodness we would have been in trouble. What would that have said about the compass of the negotiations, the nature of the deal?”
Members of the NIWC at press conference (Negotiators Pearl Sagar (left) and Monica McWilliams (centre), Chief Strategist, Bronagh Hinds (3rd from left)).
Many are quick to dismiss the role of the Coalition as having been a nice but not necessary aspect of the negotiations. However, it is impossible to know the counterfactual. Had they not been there to unlock certain perspectives, would that problem have been resolved? Had they not built the relationships to know that a party was at their limit of concessions, might that party have walked away, resulting in the breakdown of the talks? If they had not persevered in the inclusion of victims recognition in the final text, would the public have been able to stomach the difficult provisions of prisoner releases when they voted for the agreement in the public referendum?
The lessons of the Women’s Coalition are multiple. On the one hand, the refutation of their impact illuminates who gets to be seen as “real” negotiators and whose contributions are seen to matter. It is the male actors, engaged in the deeply positional bargaining, who are credited with doing the “real work” and the women merely “helped.” Building relationships, trust, and uncovering the interests behind the positions, aspects largely associated with best practices in negotiation, are quickly discredited when employed by the Women’s Coalition (yet extolled when embraced by talks chairman George Mitchell). The NIWC made the best of a bad hand, and indeed were successful in getting reference to victims, human rights, integrated education, and a Civic Forum in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. (The near non-existent implementation of these aspects in comparison to other security and governance focused provisions is a story for another blog post). Yet when considering the impact women’s inclusion can have on these processes, we must also recognise that when it came to explicitly gendered provisions, politically contentious issues, or other presumed outcomes of women’s participation, they had very little coercive power to assert their priorities. By insisting on inclusion alone without attention to power, the burden for change is inadvertently placed on those with the least capacity to alter the structural dynamics. Moreover, we miss real institutional changes that might be adopted to create a more genuinely equitable process and enduring outcomes.
Alex McAuliff is a doctoral candidate at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. As a critical international relations scholar, her work focuses on gender, peace negotiations, and post-conflict transformation. Upon completing her doctoral work in May, she will join the Bates College Politics Department as an Assistant Professor.