In consideration of UN Resolution 1325 (which called for women's equal participation in promoting peace and security and for greater efforts to protect women exposed to violence during and after conflict), this volume takes stock of the current state of knowledge on women, peace and security issues, including efforts to increase women's participation in post-conflict reconstruction strategies and their protection from wartime sexual violence.
As warriors, freedom fighters and victims, as mothers, wives and prostitutes, and as creators and members of peace movements, women are inevitably caught up in the net of war. Yet women's participation in warfare and peace campaigns has often been underestimated or ignored. Images of Women in Peace and War explores women's relationships to war, peace, and revolution, from the Amazons, Inka and Boadicea, to women soldiers in South Africa, Mau Mau freedom fighters and the protestors at Greenham Common. The contributors consider not only the reality of women's participation but also look at how their actions have been perceived and represented across cultures and through history. They examine how sexual imagery is constructed, how it is used to delineate women's relation to warfare and how these images have sometimes been subverted in order to challenge the status quo. The book raises important questions about whether women have a special prerogative to promote peace and considers whether the experience of motherhood leads to a distinctive women's position on war. The authors find that their analyses lead them to deal with arguments on the basic nature of the sexes and to reevaluate our concepts of "peace," "war," and "gender."
This book describes the author's findings of the effects of conflict on women and of their achievements in working towards peace and reconciliation. Based on extensive interviews with staff of women's organizations, the media, religious organizations and those directly involved in armed conflict and peace processes. system on steps to increase protection for women and support their inclusion in peace negotiations and reconstruction.
Women, War and Peace in South Asia examines the many different experiences women have of conflict in this region. Rita Manchanda shifts the focus away from the victimhood discourse (such as The Grieving Mother) and explores women's agency for both peace and conflict. The book is structured around six narratives of women negotiating violent politics in their everyday lives.
In the watershed year of 1919, world leaders met in Paris, promising to build a new international order rooted in democracy and social justice. Female activists demanded that statesmen live up to their word. Excluded from the negotiating table, women met separately, crafted their own agendas, and captured global headlines with a message that was both straightforward and revolutionary: enduring peace depended as much on recognition of the fundamental humanity and equality of all people—regardless of sex, race, class, or creed—as on respect for the sovereignty of independent states. Peace on Our Terms follows dozens of remarkable women from Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Asia as they crossed oceans and continents; commanded meeting halls in Paris, Zurich, and Washington; and marched in the streets of Cairo and Beijing. Mona L. Siegel’s sweeping global account of international organizing highlights how Egyptian and Chinese nationalists, Western and Japanese labor feminists, white Western suffragists, and African American civil rights advocates worked in tandem to advance women’s rights. Despite significant resistance, these pathbreaking women left their mark on emerging democratic constitutions and new institutions of global governance. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Peace on Our Terms is the first book to demonstrate the centrality of women’s activism to the Paris Peace Conference and the critical diplomatic events of 1919. Siegel tells the timely story of how female activists transformed women’s rights into a global rallying cry, laying a foundation for generations to come.
This edited volume explores the everyday struggles and challenges of women living in the South Caucasus. The primary aim of the collection is to shift the pre-occupation with geopolitical analysis in the region and to share new empirical research on women and social change. The contributors discuss a broad range of topics, each relating to women’s everyday challenges during periods (past and present) of turbulent transformation and conflict, thus helping make sense of these transformations as well as adding new empirical insights to larger questions on life in the South Caucasus. Part I begins the discussion of women and social change in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan by examining the contradictions between traditional gender roles and emancipation and how they continue to dictate women’s lives. Part II focuses on women’s experiences of war and conflict in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Nagorny Karabakh, as well as displacement from Abkhazia and Azerbaijan. Part III examines the challenges faced by sexual minorities in Georgia and feminist activism in Azerbaijan. Women's Everyday Lives in War and Peace in the South Caucasus will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, politics, gender studies and history.
In the early 2000s, Liberian women wearing wrap skirts and white T-shirts, shouting: ‘We want peace, no more war’, attracted international attention. After almost fifteen years of civil war, the enduring active, multifaceted, and non-violent campaigning for peace by women’s organisations contributed to the end of the fighting and the signing of a peace agreement between the warring factions. Although it is widely assumed that women’s inclusion in peace processes yields greater attention to women’s issues and needs in the aftermath of a conflict, this is only partly the case in Liberia. Thus, this analysis looks beyond the extraordinary commitment by women in Liberia and deals with the questions to what extent their role in the peace process has contributed to gender-sensitive outcomes in post-conflict Liberian society and why greater gender sensitivity was not achieved. By focusing on manifestations of patterns of masculinity in the public and private spheres, Anne Theobald identifies factors at different levels of analysis within different time frames that elucidate the unexpected outcome. Not only does this provide for a more encompassing understanding of dynamics of gender relations and context-specific variables impeding gender sensitivity in post-conflict settings, but it also helps to refine prevailing theoretical approaches on gender in peacemaking and peacebuilding and to develop more holistic, context-specific, and efficient policy approaches, which can effectively lead to gender-sensitive peace.
This book provides a critical assessment of the impact of UN Resolution 1325 by examining the effect of peacebuilding missions on increasing gender equality within conflict-affected countries. UN Resolution 1325 was adopted in October 2000, and was the first time that the security concerns of women in situations of armed conflict and their role in peacebuilding was placed on the agenda of the UN Security Council. It was an important step forward in terms of bringing women’s rights and gender equality to bear in the UN’s peace and security agenda. More than a decade after the adoption of this Resolution, its practical reality is yet to be substantially felt on the ground in the very societies and regions where women remain disproportionately affected by armed conflict and grossly under-represented in peace processes. This realization, in part, led to the adoption in 2008 and 2009 of three other Security Council Resolutions, on sexual violence in conflict, violence against women, and for the development of indicators to measure progress in addressing women, peace and security issues. The book draws together the findings from eight countries and four regional contexts to provide guidance on how the impact of Resolution 1325 can be measured, and how peacekeeping operations could improve their capacity to effectively engender security. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, gender studies, the United Nations, international security and IR in general.
