From entering legislatures to joining presidential cabinets, greater women’s political empowerment is widely understood as critical for making peace last after wars end. Women 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 political 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 have little understanding of how it is achieved or why it happens so infrequently. This dissertation argues that how women participate in the peace processes matters greatly for women’s political empowerment in the years that follow. 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 the different roles they play in peace processes shape women’s pathways to power. Using a novel dataset on Women in Peace and Empowerment (WPE) and four case studies (the Philippines, Nepal, Liberia, and El Salvador), including 18 original interviews with participants of peace processes and members of post-conflict governments, this dissertation assesses the relationship between women’s peace process participation and political empowerment after conflict. Findings reveal that when local women participate in both formal and informal peace processes, they experience the greatest political empowerment after conflict ends. The findings also highlight the importance of local women’s influence on the text of the peace agreements for women’s empowerment in the years following the peace process. The results illustrate some of the long-term consequences of gender-inclusive peace processes and underscore the need to pay attention not just to whether women are present, but how they contribute to peace processes. This dissertation contributes a new theoretical explanation for women’s political empowerment after conflict, a novel typology of women’s roles in formal peace processes, and novel empirical insights from difficult-to-access peace participants and policymakers on the connections between formal and informal peace processes.