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[home]>[programmes]>women
peace movements
Overview
Where are the women in conflict? They are mothers grieving for sons dead
and missing. They are widows or half widows struggling to survive in
female-headed households bringing up orphaned children and the aged.
They are the refugees displaced from homes. They are the raped and the
murdered in wars. Essentially, women in conflict are visible as the
overwhelming victims of war. Civilian casualties, the vast majority of
which are women and children, account for 90 percent of all deaths in
today’s conflicts. Women and girls make up 80 percent of refugees.
Disempowered in peacetime, women in time of conflict - a time of
decision by arms- are even more disadvantaged in asserting their right
and the right of their children to entitlements. It stands to reason
that women have the greatest stake in peace. But where are the women in
peace making?
Women are the chorus at peace rallies, the front line of the
humanitarian story, but they are not on the dais, they do not determine
the agenda. In the end, they are invisible. History has little or no
space to record women’s experience of war, as if it was undifferentiated
from that of men; it carries no chronicle of women’s resistance and
peace making effort, as if it made no difference.
Part of the difficulty of making women’s activism in peace building
visible and therefore mainstreaming gender in the political activity of
peace agreements and the actual planning for a society's reconstruction,
is that women themselves see their activity as non political and an
extension of their domestic concerns- “stretched roles”. Moreover,
women’s visibility is further obscured by the fact that their language
of support and resistance flows from their cultural experience,
especially of being disempowered. The creative anarchy, non violence and
non hierarchical characteristics that mark women's innovative actions
for peace, challenge traditional notions of what political action should
and can be about. Since women’s activism in building peace and
reconciliation at the grassroots level is grounded in the informal space
of politics, it gets undervalued and as post conflict politics moves
into formal space, it gets marginalised. Increasingly, women peace
activists are emphasising the importance of women making the transition
from informal space to the formal space of political structures.
SAFHR’s research cum advocacy itinerary on Women, Conflict & Peace
seeks to make women’s gender differentiated experience of conflict
visible and to demonstrate that women’s experience is a valuable
resource in managing community survival, conflict mitigation and
building peace.
Programmatic activities encompass research and publications, regional
and country dialogues, training workshops, women-n-peace network,
advocacy campaigns.
Overall Objectives.
- to tap women's experience of conflict as a resource in conflict
resolution and strengthen their capacity for peace building
- to interrogate whether there is a gendered notion of peace and a
gendered praxis of peace making.
- to mainstream women in the peace and resettlement processes
- to strengthen women’s capacity for activism and mobilization
- to develop a network of women peace activists for sharing and
solidarity
Research
The research programme engages with the cluster of questions derived
from two basic assumptions. One, that “women do constitute a group for
organising in any unified fashion around issues of war and peace”,
notwithstanding that gender is intersected by class, caste, ethnicity
and religious identity. Two, that women can make a difference in
conflict resolution and peace. The research project examines whether
there is a gendered notion of peace and a gendered praxis of peace
building? Research is planned as a site for advocacy on mainstreaming
women in the peace and reconstruction processes. The framework is
regional and comparative and the methodology participatory.
Dialogues & Advocacy
SAFHR’s practically oriented programmes aim to create an enabling
environment for women peace activists in the region to dialogue across
conflict divides, to build local capacity for women peace activists, to
share strategies, to network and lobby and to raise consciousness of
women’s activity as political. The regional dialogues provide an
opportunity for women peace activists negotiating distinct conflict
situations in the region to interact and
learn from each other on how to
strengthen activism and mobilization for peace; how to integrate a
gender perspective in peace negotiations; how to provide for the special
needs of women refugees and demobilized women combatants and how to
safeguard the ambivalent gains for women’s empowerment ensuing from
conflict. In addition there is SAFHR’s two fledgling initiatives – in
Jammu and Kashmir to launch
a forum to enable women to mobilize and in North East (India) its
training workshops in capacity building in relation to the media.
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