This monograph presents the findings of the RAND Corporation’s Women and Nation Building Project, which is designed to assess the multilayered development of women’s diverse roles in the post-conflict context.

The principal task of this study was an overarching consideration of women and nation-building, an exceedingly complex task which was simplified by our ability to use examples from the recent nation-building activities in Afghanistan. Those examples provided several pragmatic points for consideration.

Our findings should prove useful and interesting to policymakers, practitioners, and scholars concerned with both the academic and the pragmatic implementation of a more-engendered approach to nation-building. Comments from readers are welcome and can be addressed to the lead author or the center directors listed below.

This research was conducted within the Initiative for Middle Eastern Youth and the RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy. The Initiative for Middle Eastern Youth is funded by donations from private individuals and sources in the State of Qatar. The RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy, part of International Programs at the RAND Corporation, aims to improve public policy by providing decisionmakers and the public with rigorous, objective research on critical policy issues affecting the Middle East.

More information about RAND is available at www.rand.org. For more information on the Initiative for Middle Eastern Youth, please contact the Director, Cheryl Benard. She can be reached by phone at 703-413-1100, extension 5379; or by mail at RAND, 1200 South Hayes Street, Arlington, Virginia 22202-5050. (Preface)

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Cheryl Benard, Seth G. Jones, Olga Oliker, Cathryn Quantic Thurston, Brooke K. Stearns, Kristen Cordell
© Copyright 2008 RAND Corporation

Summary

The challenge of nation-building, i.e., dealing with the societal and political aftermaths of conflicts and putting new governments and new social compacts into place, has occupied much international energy during the past several decades. As an art, a process, and a set of competencies, it is still very much in an ongoing learning and experimentation phase. The RAND Corporation has contributed to the emerging knowledge base in this domain through a series of studies that have looked at nation-building enterprises led by the United States and others that were led by the United Nations and have examined the experiences gained during the reconstruction of specific sectors.

Our study focuses on gender and nation-building. It considers this issue from two aspects: First, it examines gender-specific impacts of conflict and post-conflict and the ways in which events in these contexts may affect women differently than they affect men. Second, it analyzes the role of women in the nation-building process, in terms of both actual current practices, as far as these could be measured and ascertained, and possible outcomes that might occur if these practices were to be modified.

The study team first surveyed the broader literature on women in development, women and governance, women and conflict, and women in nation-building. It then focused on the case of Afghanistan. This case study was chosen for three reasons: First, it is contemporary, and it offers a longer nation-building “track record” and thus more data than does Iraq, the other contemporary case. Second, the relevant debate and decision line is easy to track because gender issues have been overtly on the table from the beginning of U.S. post-conflict involvement in Afghanistan, in part because of the Taliban’s equally overt prior emphasis on gender issues as a defining quality of its regime.

Third, in contrast to earlier cases of nation-building, the issue of women’s inclusion is presently an official part of any development agenda, so that all the active agents in the nation-building enterprise have made conscious choices and decisions in that regard which can be reviewed and their underlying logic evaluated.

The study concludes with a broad set of analytic and policy recommendations. First, we identify the gaps in data collection and provide specific suggestions for improvement. Then, we recommend three shifts in emphasis that we believe are likely to strengthen the prospects of stability and enhance the outcomes of nation-building programs: a more genuine emphasis on the broader concept of human security from the earliest phases of the nation-building effort; a focus on establishing governance based on principles of equity and consistent rule of law from the start; and economic inclusion of women in the earliest stages of reconstruction activities.

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