Browsing by Author "Tandberg, Nikolai Evensen"

There are few events a country can experience that are as traumatizing as a civil war and its effects can affect a country and its citizens for the foreseeable future. In a civil war, one or more groups are so divided from each other that they end up in an armed conflict. Within political science, there has emerged an interest in how unstable societies, with a divided population, democratically can attempt to maintain the fragile peace. Power Sharing aims to include and distribute power between the opposing groups with the hope that they will develop an interest in avoiding further armed conflict. There are a number of different ways of distributing power and the various tools can be divided into four dimensions of power sharing. The various power-sharing dimensions are political power-sharing, economical power-sharing, military power-sharing, and territorial power-sharing. From a feminist point of view, there are several problematic aspects with power sharing. Although women often constitute the majority of the population in a post-conflict society, women as a group are often completely overlooked in favour of the conflicting groups. As a result, women often experience political exclusion and are underrepresented in politics. Women have also been overlooked for a long time in the research of power sharing and its various political effects. Therefore, the aim of the thesis is to investigate whether there is a connection between the choice of different power-sharing dimensions and the proportion of female political representation in a post-conflict society. Furthermore, I want to investigate which power-sharing dimension gives the highest proportion of female political representation in a post-conflict society. The material consists of 45 civil wars that ended between 1970 and 2022. The material is analysed using a factorial ANOVA. First, the proportion of female political representation at the first national political election after the end of the civil war is analysed. Thereafter, the proportion of female political representation as of 01.01.2022 is analysed At the first political election, the analysis shows that the use of political power-sharing and military power-sharing has a statistically significant effect on the proportion of female political representation, versus not using these. Territorial power-sharing also has a statistically significant effect if one removes the outlier that is identified. These significant findings are not found in the second analysis, but the analysis shows that the use of especially economic power-sharing and political power-sharing gave a higher proportion of female political representation compared to not using these. As the material is relatively small and there are few post-conflict societies that have not adopted political power-sharing, one must be wary of putting too much emphasise of the result. The analyses do not find that use of any of the different power-sharing dimensions results in a significantly higher proportion of female political representation than the others.