This book has pursued one key question: Why are women's rights and rates of leadership improving more rapidly in postconflict countries in Africa than elsewhere on the continent, particularly in countries that have experienced major conflict? This chapter takes the key findings and situates them in a broader frame of gender regime change. It points to where this study takes us and what new unexplored issues emerge from this study.

At one level, the book argues that a combination of factors needs to be considered in linking postconflict dynamics with women's rights in Africa after the 1990s. They include disruptions in gender roles during conflict, the role of autonomous women's movements enabled by political opening, and changing international norms and UN pressures on governments.

Changing opportunity structures that limit or, in this case, facilitate social movements – in the form of peace negotiations and constitutional and electoral processes – allowed women's organizations to intervene in new ways to assert their interests, particularly a gender agenda. This was because the end of conflict shook up leadership structures, thus necessitating institutional change. Gaining power was at the core of the strategy of women activists because it was key to realizing their other demands.

At another level, this book is about a much bigger story that has to do with how gender regime change occurs. Laura Shepherd (2008) has argued that violence in war is gendered but it also creates gender. This book has shown that violence in the context of war, depending on other circumstances, can also disrupt and transform gender power relations.