by Anne Marie Goetz, Irene M. Santiago, and Hsin-Hui Hsu
A global campaign to engage women around the world in conflict resolution called ‘Women’s Peace Tables’ is underway, with a view to building a significant global coalition of women peacemakers by 2020. A strategy session of conveners and advisors to this initiative was held at the NYU Center for Global Affairs on December 8th. It aimed to reflect on the state of women’s rights in the context of the global groundswell of parochial and populist ideologies, and to identify fruitful areas in which to connect women’s rights activism to conflict prevention and resolution.
The Women’s Peace Tables initiative is the brainchild of the Philippines peace activist Irene Santiago, who is currently Chair of the Philippine Government Implementing Panel for the Bangsamoro Peace Accords, which, in March 2014, brought an end to decades of conflict between the Moro people of the Mindanao region and the Philippines government. Like many others involved in promoting women’s engagement in peacebuilding, Santiago was frustrated by the fact that so much of the ‘Women Peace and Security’ (WPS) agenda stalls at the level of rhetoric. The UN Security Council, for instance, has an impressive infrastructure of normative agreements to ensure women’s participation in conflict prevention and resolution, yet tends to focus mainly on women as victims, not as agents of change in conflict situations. The same is true at the national level. With the exception of peace agreements in the Philippines (2014) and Colombia (2016), most peace negotiations are not only dominated by men, but by armed actors, with the result that agreements tend to cement the power of violent parties, and exclude those with an interest in long-term social justice and sustained peace. In spite of research showing that by engaging, in particular, women’s civil society groups, peace agreements are 25% more likely to survive their first and most difficult few years, women’s groups and women leaders are the last to be included. The Women’s Peace Tables initiative, driven by the #WomenSeriously campaign to bring women and gender equality issues into national and international peace making and peacebuilding, seeks to build a global coalition of women peace-makers to make women’s inclusion in conflict resolution a norm, not a random exception.
The CGA December 8th meeting elicited reflection from seasoned peace and women’s rights activists on the current prospects for advancing women’s participation in peace negotiations. This year, 2016, saw a significant increase in the number of ‘Women’s Peace Tables’ convened around the world. These convenings occurred mainly in the month of October, the 16th anniversary of the passage of the first UN Security Council resolution on WPS. Susan Benton Hartley, with Ellen Maynes, designed the advocacy campaign to broaden concepts of peace to include any decision-making ‘tables’ from the family table to the top decision-makings in global institutions. She pointed out that here is significant variation in the purpose of these meetings – some are convened by existing peace movements; some are neighborhood associations calling a peace table after being inspired by the #WomenSeriously campaign. Their discussions range from practical responses to threats to women’s immediate security, for instance by fundraising for improved street lighting, to formal consideration of challenges to sustaining peace accords in fragile or conflict-affected states such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa, Somalia, Thailand, Pakistan, Israel and Palestine. A larger number of peace tables are expected to be convened next year. The campaign is currently not funded, bar for support from the Swiss Government for several meetings of the #WomensSeriously group including the meeting in Dublin earlier this year that launched the 2016 cycle of Women’s Peace Tables. The initiative faces a tension between fostering the context-specificity of these efforts on the one hand, and building a global project that can amplify women’s determination to take a lead role in global peace efforts on the other.
Discussions on December 8 focused on this tension and on the current and anticipated global developments that might create opportunities for women to influence international, regional and local peace efforts. Bangladesh’s Ambassador Anwarul Chowdhury, one of the conveners of #WomenSeriously and a major champion of UN Security Council resolution 1325, spoke of the need to ensure that women’s security concerns resonate with people whether at the community or the global level. Prominent US feminist academic and founder of the Rutgers Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Charlotte Bunch, discussed evolving perspectives on violence against women and other rights abuses, and of the urgent need to tackle the impact of inequalities on different categories of women – the poor, minority racial groups, and young people. There was also a reflection on the implications of the December 5 Security Council informal meeting (known as the ‘Arria Formula’ meeting) on the connections between the WPS agenda and General Recommendation 30 (GR 30) to the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). All states that have ratified CEDAW are now expected to report on GR 30, which addresses national engagement of women in foreign policy, conflict prevention, and resolution, regardless of whether countries are in conflict or not. This, potentially, greatly broadens the accountability framework for states to answer for the extent to which they engage women in national or international peacebuilding. Professor Carol Cohn, head of the Boston-based Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, stressed that the next step in making the WPS agenda resonate with women’s rights struggles more broadly is to address the material conditions for realizing rights in the global economy.
In the context of widening inequalities triggered by economic globalization, a focus on material conditions for realizing rights can help to reveal the self-defeating cycle through which most approaches to peace consolidation simply involve inducting fragile states to the lowest rungs of the global value chain, on ruinous conditions. For instance, post conflict economic support to fragile states is often oriented to the rapid absorption of fragile state economies to global production, usually through measures to pave the way for rapid installation of foreign corporations. Land laws are swiftly revised to ensure security of tenure to foreign investors (as well as to enable swift land acquisition from areas dominated by the poor). Property rights, labor laws and taxation regimes are revamped to provide attractive conditions to foreign investors. Post conflict regimes are encouraged to borrow for rapid infrastructure development, often on suboptimal terms. Conditions for these loans may drive lucrative contracts towards specific corporations – for instance Chinese loans to post-conflict Sri Lanka encouraged the awarding of contracts for road, port and airport construction to Chinese businesses. Decisions made about economic priorities, employment creation, and the location and purpose of infrastructure development, are rarely – if ever – shaped by the needs of women and girls. For instance, new transportation infrastructure may accelerate the flow of primary commodities from fragile states to foreign buyers, but may not include building smaller feeder roads between rural markets frequented by women traders, or the irrigation and drinking water technologies needed by rural and urban families, or the investments in food crop production needed to ensure post conflict food security. When these post conflict planning processes also invite re-militarization, or the presence of foreign private security companies to protect extractive industries, there can be a significant uptick in violence against women that may not adequately be prosecuted by the state for fear of threatening foreign interests.
Violence and economic exploitation linked to globalization, and the resulting poverty and marginalization of populations, undermines national confidence in the ‘peace dividend’ and the project of post-conflict democratization in many contexts. This destabilizes post conflict peacebuilding. In combination with often high levels of corruption and inaccessible policy-making, the conditions are often ripe for youth radicalization and popular discontent, and even for the rise of extremist ideologies that posit violence as the only means of social change. Women have been drawn increasingly to such movements, a phenomenon that any women’s peace table process must address.
The attacks on women’s rights that accompany populist movements of the right as well as religious extremism cannot be ignored. Several years ago, early indications of the growing threat to longstanding agreements on women’s rights led to a decision, at the UN, to avoid holding a scheduled world conference on women in 2015, which would have been the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action. Postponing this global assembly, however, has done nothing to hold back a groundswell of misogyny and threats to women’s rights. There are moves afoot to begin plans for a Fifth World Conference on Women in 2020. Should this take place, it is urgent to ensure that conservative governments do not have the power to dismantle the global women’s human rights regime. This will only happen if there is a resurgence of national women’s mobilization as well as a massive global coalition of women’s rights groups to exert popular pressure and electoral leverage to oblige governments to defend women’s rights. The Women’s Peace Tables are designed to put the building blocks in place for this global coalition, and to build unstoppable popular pressure for equality.
Anne Marie Goetz is Clinical Professor at the NYU SPS Center for Global Affairs.
Irene M. Santiago is the Lead Convener of #WomenSeriously, the Global Campaign on Women, Peace and Security.
Hsin-Hui Hsu is a graduate student in global affairs at NYU where she studies human rights issues in East and Southeast Asia.