Artistic Perspective: Representing PA-X Gender through Data Physicalisation

Design

“Pieces of Peace” is a data physicalisation artwork [1] that highlights the limited references to women and gender issues in formally signed international peace agreements, as documented in the PA-X Gender database [2]. Using debossing techniques, the artwork imprints provisions on women, girls and gender onto pieces of paper, offering a nuanced visual exploration of these underrepresented topics.

With a special focus on the Afghanistan: 2000s Post-intervention Process, the artwork represents all 22 agreements signed between 1999-2020, 16 of which contain references to women, girls, and gender. Each agreement is symbolised by a paper strip, with its length reflecting the word count of the original document. For agreements containing provisions on women and gender, debossed sections reveal the sentences directly addressing these topics. The debossed sentences are positioned proportionately within each strip, creating a textual subtlety between the invisible and visible.

The data physicalisation artwork includes three interactive elements. Visitors are invited to use handheld torches to freely create shadow effects on the debossed text, emphasising the carved-out provisions through the interplay of light and shadow, where shadow becomes the “ink.” Additionally, sample provisions are debossed onto postcards, and visitors can reveal the text by shading over it with pencils. To deepen the immersive experience and contextualise the Afghanistan focus, background audio plays in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s official languages. The voiceover features a male narrator reading most of the Bonn Agreement, with a female voice reading the sections related to gender provisions, revealing the contrast in representation.

Exhibition

This artwork was exhibited at Edinburgh Law School during the Conflict Research Society conference hosted by PeaceRep from 03–05 September 2024. The entire artwork extended over six metres, creating a visually powerful installation that invites viewers to approach and interact with it. When standing from afar, the artwork looks like blank paper cards, but when approached, the debossed text becomes more visible, emphasising that the artwork, and by extension the gender provisions, demand closer inspection. At the conference, attendees praised the artwork, appreciating the novel presentation of the data and the focus on inclusion of women and gender in peace processes.

Behind the scenes

We are a group of individuals passionate about data feminism, data visualisation and creative design. For this project, we collaborated with PeaceRep researcher and gender specialist Laura Wise to explore the complexities of gender issues in peace agreement data. Data feminism [3] emphasises that data is not neutral—in particular, it is not gender-neutral. This principle applies to peace agreement data, as it reflects negotiated political compromises, promises of societal change, and commitments to human rights protection made by various stakeholders. Peace agreements are inherently shaped by the agendas of their creators and, as a result, have different impacts on implementation and on the lives of people in conflict-affected areas.

Although UN Security Council Resolution 1325 calls for the need to adopt a “gender perspective” in peace agreements, we have not yet witnessed substantial improvements when it comes to the inclusion of gender provisions. Of all the agreements in the PA-X Database, only 21% include reference to women, girls, and gender (436 of 2,055). The majority of peace processes have a fairly low proportion of women and gender provision coverage. The Afghanistan: 2000s Post-intervention Process has a comparatively high percentage of gender provisions, with 73% of the agreements containing some mention of gender, making it one of the most gender-inclusive processes in PA-X Gender.

Despite how positive the statistics on the inclusion of gender provisions in the Afghan process seems, reading the provisions in the agreements as non-experts was a harrowing experience; they lacked clear, actionable steps, with provisions primarily consisting of repetitive suggestions about education and human rights. Considering the current deprivation of basic rights for women and girls in Afghanistan, the provisions lacked tangible measures to protect women, girls, and gender minorities from further wartime harms.

During the design process, we wanted to highlight the scarcity of provisions relating to women and gender, along with the sense of powerlessness conveyed in the provisions’ details. We went through several iterations of metaphors including an hourglass, jigsaw puzzles, strings, and nodes to make abstractions of the coded provisions. We also tried various visual encodings for different topical categories in the codebook and visualised the distributions of those categories. In the end, however, these visual embellishments felt unnecessary, as the original texts speak for themselves and the debossing technique became an ideal medium to convey the tension between seen and unseen, power and powerless.

Future work

• Afghanistan was selected as a case study in the design because the process had comparatively more provisions related to women, girls and gender. However, these hard-won gains were fleeting, given the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021. This physicalisation, while focused on Afghanistan, does not capture the entire global picture of women’s and gender involvement in peace agreements. It would be interesting to gather evidence around how gender topics are referenced across different peace processes to facilitate comparative analysis between them.
• The coded provisions in these agreements cover a broad range of issues, from sombre descriptions of women’s conditions to calls for action. In the future, we aim to explore computational methods for labelling the sentiment of these texts, as not all mention of women, girls, and gender is positive.
• Another goal is to further the design by exploring the potential of debossing techniques by experimenting with different pressures and styles to reflect different tones.

Credits

The artwork is a collaborative work among the following authors: Jenny Long, Laura Wise, Jinrui Wang, Xinhuan Shu, Tomas Vancisin, Tara Capel, Uta Hinrichs.

We are grateful to the following for their support: Mursal Ahmadzai, Amanullah Ahmadzai and Heela Yoon; the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep), funded by International Development from the UK government; and the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics and the School of Law.

Citations

[1] Long, Jenny, Wise, Laura, Wang, Jinrui, Shu, Xinhuan, Vancisin, Tomas, Capel, Tara, and Hinrichs, Uta (2024). Pieces of Peace: Women and Gender in Peace Agreements. 2024 IEEE VIS Arts Program (VISAP), 26-38. doi:10.1109/VISAP64569.2024.00007

[2] Bell, Christine, Sanja Badanjak, Juline Beaujouan, Tim Epple, Adam Farquhar, Robert Forster, Astrid Jamar, Sean Molloy, Kevin McNicholl, Kathryn Nash, Jan Pospisil, Robert Wilson, and Laura Wise (2024). PA-X Gender Peace Agreements Database and Dataset, Version 8. www.peaceagreements.org/wggsearch

[3] D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Klein, Lauren F. (2020). Data Feminism. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.