Performing Inclusion? Women, Peace, and Security Between Normative Commitment and Lived Exclusion in South Sudan

This article develops performative inclusion as an analytical lens for understanding how women are often counted within peace processes while excluded from the bargaining that matters most. Rather than treating the topic as a descriptive case note, the manuscript positions women, peace, and security in theatres of protracted conflict: unscr 1325 as normative framework, political performance, and lived experience within wider debates on African political order, state formation, and institutional design. The paper is anchored in South Sudan, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and it uses the topic brief's theoretical architecture to ask three linked questions: how do peace negotiation processes in south sudan formally incorporate wps language while structurally excluding women from the substantive bargaining over power and resource distribution? What is the relationship between the numerical inclusion of women in post-conflict security institutions (police, army) and the substantive transformation of those institutions' gendered cultures and practices? How do South Sudanese women's civil society organisations operating under acute physical insecurity and donor dependency navigate the tension between international WPS frameworks and locally rooted women's political traditions? Methodologically, the article translates the proposed design into a publication-ready strategy built around discourse analysis of wps provisions in cpa, arcss, and r-arcss; interviews with women negotiators, civil society leaders, and women sspdf and nss officers; comparative analysis with liberia and sierra leone wps implementation; feminist ethnography in juba and wau.. It argues that the central analytical payoff lies not only in better explanation of the South Sudanese or regional cases, but in clarifyin