Recent research has directed attention to the transformative potential of war for female empowerment. As a disruptive shock, armed conflict can create a window of opportunity for advancing the societal role of women. We complement this research agenda by looking at how conflict severity and termination condition the outcomes for women in the aftermath of civil conflict. We expect that both level of violence and mode of resolution affect subsequent female empowerment, where severe conflicts ending by a negotiated settlement have the greatest transformative potential. Consistent with expectations, we find that post-conflict improvements in female empowerment occur primarily after high-intensity civil conflicts. However, subsequent tests reveal that this effect is driven largely by conflicts terminated by peace agreements. The greatest improvement in female empowerment is seen when peace agreements have gender-specific provisions. These results support calls for a sustained effort toward mainstreaming gender issues in conflict resolution and peacebuilding processes.

We introduce the Anatomy of Resistance Campaigns (ARC) dataset, which records information on 1,426 organizations that participated in events of maximalist violent and nonviolent contention in Africa from 1990 to 2015. The ARC dataset contains 17 variables covering organization-level features such as type, age, leadership, goals, and interorganizational alliances. These data facilitate new measurements of key concepts in the study of contentious politics, such as the social and ideological diversity of resistance episodes, in addition to measures of network centralization and fragmentation. The ARC dataset helps resolve existing debates in the field and opens new avenues of inquiry.