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'Soft Ways of Doing Hard Things': Women Mediators and the Question of Gender in Mediation

Turner, C.

'Soft Ways of Doing Hard Things': Women Mediators and the Question of Gender in Mediation Thumbnail


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Abstract

Arguments in favour of increasing the number of women mediators rest on existing research in the field of Women Peace and Security that suggests that where women are included in peace processes that they create more sustainable agreements. It is often suggested that women mediators will bring different- ‘soft’- skills to mediation and that they will be catalysts to women’s empowerment. Drawing on a series of interviews with women mediators in Northern Ireland the article does two things. First, it explores the skills that women felt they brought to their work, and second, it draws out the relationship between mediation and gender as perceived by the participants. What the results demonstrate is that while participants did not consider it the role of a mediator to advance a particular normative agenda through their work, this did not translate into a gender blind approach in practice.

Citation

Turner, C. (2020). 'Soft Ways of Doing Hard Things': Women Mediators and the Question of Gender in Mediation. Peacebuilding, 8(4), 383-401. https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2019.1664369

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 3, 2019
Online Publication Date Oct 16, 2019
Publication Date 2020
Deposit Date Sep 10, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Peacebuilding
Print ISSN 2164-7259
Electronic ISSN 2164-7267
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 8
Issue 4
Pages 383-401
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2019.1664369

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Copyright Statement
© 2019 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.






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