In the final chapter, conventional conceptualizations of women in conflict and post-conflict situations are examined. The chapter also contains some suggestions for alternative concepts and approaches which appear to be better tools for our understanding of women 's situation and thus for the development of programmes that will assist women in their multiple efforts to rebuild their lives. The specificity and diversity of women 's experiences must be acknowledged. Only on this basis can we conduct comparative analyses and begin to develop a deeper general understanding of post-war reconstruction from a gender perspective. Second, the concluding chapter stresses the need to supplement the image of women as vulnerable victims with an image of women as a highly differentiated group of social actors, who possess valuable resources and capacities and who have their own agendas.
Women influence the course of things, and their actions are constitutive of post-war societies.
The reduction of women to targets and beneficiaries both fails to recognize their contributions and contributes to their marginalization. While special attention is given to women throughout the publication, so as to make visible the previously invisible, the aim has been to see women 's situation within a gender framework which pays attention to how gender roles and relationships are continuously constructed and contested by different actors, and which recognizes the gender dimension inherent in all aspects of post-war reconstruction. The gender perspective is also relevant for the achievement of sustainable peace. As the analysis strongly suggests, the failure to recognize gender issues may produce new social tensions and contribute to the differentiating struggles over identity, status and power that are so distinctive for societies which have recently achieved peace.