Structural drivers of gender inclusive peacebuilding and social sustainability

Gender-inclusive peacebuilding is widely promoted within the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda as essential to sustainable peace, yet research often treats participation as an isolated intervention rather than as an outcome shaped by broader socio-institutional dynamics. To address this gap, this study reconceptualizes gender-inclusive peacebuilding as a complex system and examines its structural drivers in the protracted conflict context in Thailand. An integrated analytical framework that combines the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory, network analysis, and K-means clustering is employed to identify influence relationships, assess structural embeddedness, and validate influence patterns. This approach enables a system-based analysis of interdependencies among key dimensions of gender and peacebuilding.The results reveal a layered system influence structure in which patriarchal norms, structural gender inequality, cultural violence, and gender-sensitive education function as upstream drivers, while women’s participation, leadership, and economic empowerment emerge as structurally conditioned outcomes. Policy and institutional support appear highly central yet dependent, reflecting their embeddedness within existing power relations. These results challenge participation-centric approaches by showing that inclusion alone does not drive transformative change. Instead, effective gender-inclusive peacebuilding requires addressing underlying normative and structural inequalities. In sustainability terms, gender-inclusive peacebuilding is foundational to social sustainability, as transforming gendered power relations enhances system resilience, institutional legitimacy, and long-term stability in conflict-affected societies.