The United Nations is committed to facilitating the participation of women in all stages of peacemaking and peacebuilding. Throughout October this year, the UN and many in the international community marked the 20th anniversary of the adoption of Security Council resolution 1325, which enshrined the imperative of the full inclusion of women in peace efforts, from negotiations to the implementation of agreements. As part of the commemoration of this historic Council text, the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and its partners convened a series of events to review the state of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda.
During the 28 October event, Under-Secretary-General DiCarlo called on all partners to “engage in sustained efforts to take on structural obstacles, tackle power politics, confront entrenched patriarchal attitudes, overcome socio-economic inequalities and create conditions conducive to inclusive peacemaking”. This sentiment was echoed by Hennis-Plasschaert, who stressed that “[g]reat speeches and excellent intentions must be translated into positive actions. We need to use all means available from providing our good offices, Security Council briefings, public statements, field visits, to the empowerment of those women and girls stepping up to claim their rightful place in society. Train them, work with the media and enable them to rise through community and party ranks.” Asoka advocated strongly for women’s formal and direct participation in peace processes. “Women are already included in some way in 70% of informal processes. […] But women need to be supported at every level, in every track and the formal process remains critical for influence,” she said. “That’s a basic condition to lay foundations of sustainable peace, social justice and democratic governance at national, regional, and global scale,” Brockmann said. Meanwhile, Ali urged international partners to mainstream the WPS agenda throughout. She also highlighted that in the recent Juba peace talks on Sudan, it was instrumental that there was both a strong push from women’s civil society and that women were able to participate in formal roles.
On 28 October, under the theme, “Beyond the Pandemic: Opening the Doors to Meaningful Participation of Women”, Rosemary DiCarlo, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA); Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Iraq and head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI); Kaavya Asoka, Executive Director of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security; Huda Ali, Feminist Peace Activist and Member of MANSAM, a Sudanese coalition of Women Civic and Political Organizations, and Erika Brockmann, a member of the Bolivian parliament from 1997 to 2005, discussed what is needed to make women’s meaningful participation a priority, during and after the COVID-19 crisis.
Winding up a month of commemoration of the anniversary of Resolution 1325, panel members agreed that in order to further the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, all stakeholders need to do better and lead by example.
In the run-up to the event, Under-Secretary-General DiCarlo gave us her take on how to coordinate efforts that open the doors to women’s meaningful participation across the spectrum of the UN’s peace and security engagements.
What does meaningful participation mean to you?Rosemary DiCarlo: For me it means full and equal. That I am considered an equal to the person sitting next to me, male or female; that I am given the floor to speak at an event as much as a man is given the floor to speak; that I am listened to when I speak and not have someone talk over me or ignore my words. So, I think it’s a question of full and meaningful participation, totally engaged in a process or a meeting, whatever we’re talking about, but it also means that I am respected by those I am speaking to.What are your personal recollections of the moment when Security Council resolution 1325 was adopted in October 2000? I’m curious about your hopes and your ambitions. How did you feel?I was covering the Western Balkans in the US Department of State at the time and, of course, a lot of the work that we were doing was working with the population on reconciliation after the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Seeing the resolution adopted, I thought, was really promising. I was hopeful that women could be seen as equals at the table, talking about a way forward for the region, particularly in Bosnia Herzegovina, where women were especially impacted about the violence during the conflict. I perhaps was overly optimistic about what it could do. From your perspective, where does the implementation of resolution 1325 stand now, 20 years after its adoption? I think we’ve made a lot of progress. I don’t think we can deny that. But there’s so much more to be done. I fear that we’ve lost some ground in the last few years, not just on 1325 but on women’s issues at large. I also believe that our goal should be implementation, implementation, implementation. We have the normative structure that we need. What we need is full, meaningful participation of women in peace processes, in political processes, and that’s going to take a lot of implementation. As I said, we’ve got the norms, we have the tools at hand, we just have to keep at it and devote not only the attention but the resources for this to happen.
This interview is an excerpt of the first episode of a DPPA podcast series. The series forms part of the “Behind the Numbers” initiative bringing together unique insights into UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000). Explore on this website how the resolution, and its sister resolutions that make up the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda, have been implemented and influenced policymaking through the lens of original United Nations data and interactive visualizations. “Behind the Numbers” offers a look behind the data on women engaged in international diplomacy and conflict prevention, trends of the international WPS agenda, and future needs for the meaningful participation of women in peace processes.
Can you tell us a success story that you’ve come across of the WPS agenda and the opportunities that it has opened up for women in peace and security?We had different envoys, who’ve been trying to resolve the crisis in Syria, and it was very clear that women were being excluded, so we created a Women’s Advisory Group. Again: No substitute for being at the table, but through this advisory group, we actually now have members of that group sitting at the table at meetings of the Constitutional Committee. We are very thrilled to see that we have been able to slowly but surely get women at the table. So, I think that’s a success story. Success stories are when women are at the table. And I don’t believe that women are more peaceful than men, but when you have women at the table, there are other issues that are brought to the forefront. Issues that impact women, that impact children, a different perspective that needs to be taken into account in order to have a peace process have an impact and last. And the statistics show that it does. Having women at the table means that there’s a greater longevity in a peace process.Now this said, I think we have to also focus on the following: It is not just about having women at the table in peace process, it is having women advance in society at large. One of the reasons that they’re not in many peace processes, is that they’re in very male-dominated societies. And until women can achieve positions throughout, it’s going to be extremely hard for them to have the percentages of women that really should be at the table going forward.What do you think men could do to push the Women, Peace and Security agenda forward?It’s absolutely critical that men be engaged. I’ll give you an example: I was working on UN issues in New York when we were trying to devise and establish UN Women. It was because a group of female ambassadors got together and kept pushing this issue, but we really couldn’t take it over the finish line until we engaged a number of men ambassadors to help us do this. And once we did, we were able to get that department established and we were thrilled.Men have to play a role. Our envoys in the field have done their very best to get as many women at the table as possible. And when they couldn’t get them at the table, were consulting them on the side, which is no substitute, I understand, but at least they were able to get the female perspective on a particular issue.The Secretary-General has played an enormous role in this by putting women in leadership positions. Across the board, he has almost reached parity, women and men, certainly in terms of the Secretariat, Funds and Programmes. In our Special Political Missions, 52% of our senior leadership – that is the Head or Deputy Head of Mission – are female. I think that’s a huge accomplishment.And we’ve worked with partners in regional organizations, who are also very supportive. My counterpart at the African Union is a huge champion of including women in peace processes. When I travel with him, we meet with women’s groups to tell them how important we think their voices are and ask how we can be of more help. With the African Union, we’ve also trained women mediators. I think men can play an enormous role!What do you think are the new challenges that COVID-19 has posed for the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda?First of all, women have been affected by the socio-economic situation because many of them work in the informal sector. So, their abilities to engage in certain kinds of activities are going to be even more difficult now that they’ve got to look for how they’re going to support themselves and their families. Second, it’s been hard with restrictions on freedom of movement, increased violence, increased hate speech. All of that said, because of our use of digital technologies we’ve been able to reach out to more women now than we had in the past. And we were able to reach women in hard to reach areas, in conflict areas, women who wouldn’t normally be able to travel to a workshop or a meeting. That’s the good part of it and that’s what we have to continue post-pandemic.What developments do you hope to see for the WPS agenda in the future?I’d like to see it fully embraced. I think there’s a lot of tribute paid to it, but I’m not sure how much is truly tied to actual implementation of the WPS agenda. I would like to see us be able to have far more women at the table in formal peace processes. We can do a lot with the informal groups, we can do a lot of training, but we really need to have women at the table. So, I’m hoping that we can, by our words, by what we’ve been doing to help nurture women during this period, actually get them at the table and make a real effort with conflict parties that they’ve got to include women.
Title picture: Alaa Murabit of the non-governmental organization Voice of Libyan Women, during the Security Council open debate on women, peace and security in October 2015. UN Photo/Amanda Voisard