Peace and Conflict Gender Analysis: Community-Level Data from the Solomon Islands

Conflict and peace are gendered activities. The exact nature of the differences between men's and women's experiences in conflict and peace, however, often remains unclear – partly due to the highly context-specific features which characterize each conflict, and partly due to a widespread lack of detailed and documented data. As a response to this paucity of data, one of the components of UNIFEM's (United Nations Development Fund for Women) Women, Peace and Security programming is to increase the availability of information on the impact of conflict on women and their roles in conflict prevention and peace building.

This paper provides a Peace and Conflict Gender Analysis (PCGA) of the Solomon Islands, focusing on data from the community-level. This PCGA forms part of the UNIFEM pilot conflict early warning project ‘Monitoring Peace and Conflict Using Gendered Early Warning Indicators'. It reconfirms the fact that women and men act in and are affected by conflict and peace in different ways, and it illustrates the fact that these roles and experiences are complex and multiple, and do not fit neatly into gendered stereotypes. Secondly, this PCGA identifies that the meaning and outcomes of men's and women's experiences in conflict and peace are influenced by existing societal gender roles and status. Finally, this in turn has important implications for the planning and implementation of post-conflict recovery and peace building processes.