Abstract:  From entering legislatures to joining presidential cabinets, greater women’s political empowerment is widely understood as critical for making peace last after wars end. Female leaders tend to invest more in health, education and other social welfare programs, elevating levels of development and stability. However, most research on women’s empowerment focuses on peacetime, leaving little understanding of how the phenomenon transpires in the fragile post-conflict period. Recent research acknowledges the end of conflict as an opportunity for expanding empowerment but scholars still do not understand how it is achieved or why it happens so infrequently. This book argues that how women participate in the peace processes that end war matters greatly for women’s political empowerment in the years that follow. Specifically, local women’s increased engagement across all aspects of the peace process increases the likelihood that women are more likely to enter leadership positions in national government. The argument challenges oversimplified assumptions in recent research that the presence of women in peace processes is sufficient for empowerment; instead, who women are and their different types of peace process participation shapes women’s pathways to power. Testing the argument against competing explanations, the book employs multiple methods, including multivariate regression analysis on a novel dataset, four case studies (Philippines, Nepal, Liberia, and El Salvador), and 18 interviews with peace process participants and members of government in Nepal and the Philippines. In addition to introducing an original argument for women’s post-conflict empowerment, the book reveals which pathways matter most for connecting peace process participants to peace outcomes - from quotas to role modeling behavior. The book also offers peace and conflict scholars a useful typology of different types of women’s participation in peace processes and reveals findings from analyses of the new Women in Peace and Empowerment Dataset.