A seat is not the same as power

Steven Watson | EdgeLab | Research and Scholarship | 19 September 2026

When women gain a place in a peace process, what power comes with the seat? Participation counts matter, but a meeting can include people whose concerns never shape the agenda, whose public credibility is attacked online and whose accounts are repeated without acquiring authority. Digital communication may widen access while moving consequential decisions somewhere else.

Three places where parity can fail

Temitope Omotola Odusanya develops this problem in a conceptual study of gender parity in digitally mediated peacebuilding. The paper distinguishes three domains. Institutional parity concerns formal access, agenda-setting and decisions. Digital parity concerns visibility and influence across platforms and networks. Narrative parity concerns whose knowledge is treated as credible and whose account of peace becomes legitimate.

The central claim is that inclusion in one domain can coexist with exclusion in another. Odusanya calls this performative parity: the appearance of gender inclusion without a corresponding redistribution of authority. A woman may join a consultation but not a negotiation; an online campaign may attract international attention without changing a settlement; gender-sensitive language may enter policy while women remain absent from the decisions it describes.

This is a conceptual-analytic paper rather than a systematic review or causal study. It brings feminist peacebuilding, Women, Peace and Security scholarship and digital-governance research together through purposive reading and citation tracing. Afghanistan and Sudan are used as illustrative cases. In both, the paper contrasts women’s civic and digital mobilisation with their restricted influence in formal negotiations, including the 2020 intra-Afghan talks and Sudan’s 2023 Jeddah negotiations.

What the framework makes visible

The paper’s strongest move is to separate being present, being visible and being authoritative. Digital participation is often counted as an expansion of voice, yet platforms also rank, amplify and moderate speech. Harassment and claims that women lack the right expertise can turn visibility into exposure rather than influence. The framework helps practitioners ask where agendas are prepared, who controls informal coordination channels and whose interpretation is accepted when accounts conflict.

Odusanya also avoids treating platforms as neutral additions to an otherwise unchanged peace process. Hybrid processes connect negotiation rooms, messaging systems, online advocacy, media narratives and transnational networks. Power can move between those settings. A quota at the formal table therefore cannot show, by itself, whether participants can affect what happens before or after the meeting.

A useful diagnosis still needs testing

The framework is persuasive as a diagnostic vocabulary, but the evidence does not yet establish how the three domains interact. The literature selection was theoretically guided rather than systematic, and Afghanistan and Sudan were chosen to illustrate the framework rather than compare cases using a common empirical protocol. This makes the cases illuminating examples, not independent tests of “performative parity”.

The three domains may also overlap. Narrative authority is partly produced by institutions and platforms, while digital influence can depend on offline funding, security and organisational position. Treating them as separable helps analysis, but future research must specify what would count as power in each domain and how a change in one can be traced into another. The suggested indicator “agenda uptake”, for example, requires evidence about whose proposal entered which decision and with what consequence.

A plausible alternative reading is that partial inclusion sometimes creates resources for later change. Visibility without immediate institutional authority need not be merely performative if it builds networks, records abuses or changes future bargaining conditions. The important question is temporal: does a limited gain open a pathway to later influence, or does it repeatedly substitute for it?

An AE interpretation: follow recognition into the next decision

The following is my interpretation, not Odusanya’s theoretical position. Autopoietic ecology asks what makes an action possible and whether its effects renew the capacity to act again. From this perspective, a recognised contribution matters not only because it appears in a process but because of what it can alter later.

EdgeLab’s research programme distinguishes acknowledging a burden from allowing the account of that burden to change an allocation. Applied here, a peace institution may invite testimony about online abuse, publish it and still leave platform access, protection, agenda control and negotiating authority unchanged. Recognition has occurred; consequence has not.

The AE Concept Guide suggests tracing the relation rather than attributing power to a seat, a person or a platform alone. Who supplies the technical access? Who absorbs the risk of visibility? Who can carry a claim from consultation into a draft agreement? Who can challenge its disappearance? The paper does not prove this AE account, but its three-domain framework offers a practical map for following these transitions.

What a stronger test would look like

A next study could follow a small number of proposals through one peace process. It would record who formulated each proposal, how it travelled through formal meetings and digital channels, how participants’ credibility was contested, and whether the proposal changed text, resources or implementation. Interviews should include excluded actors as well as officials, mediators and platform staff. Repeated observations would show whether visibility accumulates into authority or becomes a recurring substitute for it.

Odusanya gives practitioners a sharper question than “how many women participated?” The task is to discover whether access, visibility and authority reinforce one another. Counting seats remains necessary, but it is only the start of analysing who can make a peace process different.

Reference

Odusanya, T. O. (2026). “Who gets a seat at the table and who holds power? Gender parity and peace in the digital age.” Frontiers in Political Science, 8, 1878302. Published 17 September 2026. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1878302.