What Peace? What Process?

I found this article to be very interesting, mostly because it talked about the problems with our current peace-making processes. The piece that I found the most interesting was the third criticism that the author brought up; he said that “those who held the guns or the dominant position on the battlefield…became negotiating partners” (pg. 6). He goes on to say that the peace procedures are predominantly male. I found this interesting because I think there would be more of a balance to have an equal representation of both genders at the table, because after all, each culture has males and females. I wonder if this has any connection to the fact that he says the solutions do not usually look towards challenging the dominant social/political organizations; after all these men automatically have a better social and political position if they are the ones at the tables. Maybe more importantly than including a larger number of women at the table, perhaps a larger variety of socioeconomic status needs to be represented. On another side note, I liked how the author mentioned that the peace solution is not long term unless it is continuously upheld and it addresses a lot of underlying conflicts. For example, my sister and I do not get along, but if we merely sat down and said a list of things that we both agreed to do, nothing about our conflict would change if we did not discuss why we were having issues in the first place.