The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

Thus, four areas of experience were included: Rwanda, Somalia, the
Middle East and ex-Yugoslavia: four very different conflict and war contexts,
not mutually comparable, different in their respective histories and
their socio-cultural and economic contexts, their international frameworks
and their in tervention strategies, and also different in terms of
their specific current situations of war, conflict and post-war development.
However, there is one direct, common and provocative issue:
how can it be that the enormous amount of work and experience in
peace practice accumulated by women and by many selfless men, who
are all struggling in their own contexts for compromise and peace, has
entered to such a small degree into the general strategies of conflict
prevention and of positive measures for peace building? And what about
support for the civil resistance in war and violent conflict? Is the work
of civilian women to secure the survival of their children and their families
even noticed? Sometimes, as in the cases of Asha Haji Elmi, Bosiljka
Schedlich or Ruchama Marton, women receive awards and then enjoy
a brief moment of public attention, but they then immediately disappear
back into their practical projects, their grassroots work, and when the
“big” issues of conflict prevention and conflict transformation arise,
wom en’s experience and women’s perspectives on conflict are hardly
ever embedded in the strategies. Nonetheless there certainly have been
successes:
Two major issues involving women have been incorporated into the official
discourse on war and peace since the adoption of Resolution 1325
by the UN in 2000, and the passage in 2008 of UN Resolution 1820 on
the criminal prosecution of sexualized wartime violence. These are the
issues of the rape of women as a measure of war, and the participation
of women in the construction of peace processes in the context of
Wom en’s Leadership. Woman experts are incorporated into the international
court teams for conflict management, and in specific projects
(cf. e.g. Kennedy School of Governance, ISIS Europe), and further train -
ing strategies for women from conflict regions are being tested, so that
their participation can be secured in the construction of civil structures.
“A long, tedious international struggle of women has achieved successes
in recent years. At the international level, both in the international
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