Gender Responsive Conflict Analysis Specialist Researcher - International Consultant - Home Based
Background
UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. The Arab States region remains one of the most conflict-affected regions in the world, with multiple protracted and emerging crises, including in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq, generating profound humanitarian, political, economic, and developmental consequences. These crises unfold in contexts where the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda remains critically under-implemented, and where the gap between WPS commitments and action continues to widen. Women and girls bear a disproportionate burden of conflict, facing heightened risks of gender-based violence, displacement, loss of livelihoods, and systematic exclusion from peace negotiations, political transitions, and recovery processes. Yet women in the region have not been only victims of conflict, they have been active peacebuilders, community leaders, and agents of resilience and recovery. The relationship between conflict and gender inequality is complex, context-specific, and mutually reinforcing. Conflict erodes institutional protections, discriminately reshapes social norms, and frequently deepens pre-existing gender inequalities, curtailing women's rights and shrinking civic space. Conversely, entrenched gender inequality fuels conflict dynamics through the accumulation of grievances, unequal access to resources and decision-making, and the exclusion of women from political and social processes. Advancing the WPS agenda, with its four pillars of participation, prevention, protection, and relief and recovery, requires a rigorous understanding of these interlocking dynamics as the foundation for effective advocacy, programming, and policy engagement.
Components of the Gender-Responsive Conflict Analysis
Component 1: Analysis of Actors and Context Analyzes the roles, relationships, and capacities of diverse actors, state and non-state, CSOs including women-led organizations and women peacebuilders, regional and global entities, in shaping conflict, peace and post conflict dynamics. It examines how power, social norms, and patriarchal structures influence conflict trajectories and constrain or enable women's participation and leadership in peace processes and post conflict recovery/reconstruction processes. It also provides a contextual overview of key conflict dynamics across the region, highlighting timelines and turning points with explicit WPS implications.
Component 2: Analysis of Causes, Evolving Dynamics, and Manifestations of Conflict Examines the gendered root causes, drivers, and triggers of conflict, including how gender-based inequalities and exclusions contribute to fragility and undermine sustainable peace. Consistent with the WPS prevention pillar, it analyzes how conflict reshapes women's rights, protection risks, and civic space, and identifies structural barriers to women's participation in early warning, mediation, and conflict prevention.
Component 3: Analysis of Gender Dimensions of Key Thematic Issue Areas Examines how gender dynamics shape and are shaped by issues central to sustainable conflict resolution. The methodology should prioritize key issue areas for deeper analysis that may include legal reform, security sector governance, transitional justice, political participation, humanitarian response, climate change, and economic recovery. Each area is assessed against WPS commitments and relevant Security Council resolutions, identifying entry points for gender-responsive and gender-transformative approaches.
Component 4: Actionable WPS-Anchored Recommendations Translates findings into concrete, evidence-based recommendations for UN Women's advocacy, policy, and programming, explicitly linked to WPS implementation across the region. Recommendations are tailored to key audiences including the UN system, the League of Arab States, Member States, donors, and civil society, and structured around the four WPS pillars, including opportunities to strengthen national WPS action plans and accountability mechanisms.
Interrelated Thematic Areas
Social Norms and Gender Inequality The analysis should examine through an intersectional lens how conflict interacts with pre-existing patriarchal social norms, both entrenching and, in some cases, disrupting them. It should explore how norms governing women's mobility, roles, and status are instrumentalized during conflict, and how post-conflict norm reconstruction often reverses gains made during crisis periods.
Legal and Economic Barriers to Gender Equality and Protection The analysis should assess the possible linkages between conflict and existing legal barriers to gender equality and the progress in implementing international normative feminist framework, with a focus on how power, exclusion and inequality shape conflict dynamics. Findings will be validated with UN Women and stakeholders prior to finalization. Where relevant, the analysis will also draw on available quantitative data sources such as the Georgetown institute for WPS’s WPS index, and UN ESCWA’s Peace tracker.