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Introduction
The inclusion of women and youth in international peacebuilding has become topical in policy and scholarly discussions. This is more so in the critical peace literature which advocates for the inclusion of key local actors, such as young people and women to build local capacity for sustainable peace and development (McCann, 2015; McLeod, 2015; Lee, 2019). As Fritz (2016) asserts, defining inclusive peacebuilding is difficult because different actors ascribe different meanings to inclusion. Nonetheless, Fritz, like other scholars generally agrees that inclusive peacebuilding concerns the involvement and participation of all the key stakeholders in peacebuilding processes. In contemporary global policy arenas, Aulin (2019) opines, inclusion and sustainable peace have become almost synonymous with civil society participation, largely focusing on women and young people. From a functionalist perspective, the inclusion of women and youth is aimed at causing a broader, sustained development and poverty alleviation (Edralin et al., 2015). Besides, the Human rights lexicon also views inclusive participation as an inalienable right ascribed to people from all backgrounds, especially minority and vulnerable groups (Obani and Gupta, 2017). The peacebuilding and conflict resolution scholarship, meanwhile, suggests that inclusive participation processes promise sustainable peace because they enhance legitimacy and ownership of peacebuilding interventions (Kaplan, 2010; Von Billerbeck, 2015; Lee, 2019). Generally, inclusive, mass participatory peace processes have mostly been associated with grassroots peacebuilding, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been the most active actors in this field in the global South, serving as interlocutors between citizen groups, as well as between state actors/institutions and citizens (Paffenholz and Spurk, 2006).
While the participation of women and youth has been discussed on many dimensions in the literature, there remains a key aspect of the inclusion discourse and practice which is not adequately discussed. Addressing this knowledge gap, this study observes that while women have gained prominence in peacebuilding activities and discussions, young women [1] remain largely absent from these spaces in some contexts in the global South. This creates a situation of “women but not young women,” in the discourse and practice of inclusive peacebuilding. The article addresses this important grey zone in the peacebuilding literature using the theory of inclusive development and data from semi-structured interviews and focuses group discussions conducted in Ghana. This article is derived from...