Dr Patricia Lewis
It’s wonderful to see you here this evening. May I say, on behalf of Chatham House, a belated International Women’s Day greetings to you all here. I’m really pleased that you could be here to talk about inclusive peacebuilding. My name’s Patricia Lewis. I’m the Research Director here for International Security, and I also work on issues to do with conflict, science and transformation, and the connection between those things.
Before we start, let me just say that this event is on the record. It’s being live streamed, and please use Twitter. Use the #CHEvents, which is very helpful to us, and if you wouldn’t mind, while you’re using Twitter and texting away to your friends, etc., would you please put your phones on silent mode. It’s very helpful for us if you can do that and just to say that we have a colleague stand at the back, just in case of any emergency or anything like that, in case we need to get out.
So, I am delighted to have with us two of the most interesting and leading women, who work on issues to do with peacebuilding. We have Dr Awino Okech and we have Wajd Barahim, Saleh Barahim, who are here to talk to us, to look at the role that women play in peacebuilding processes, how we learn, how we frame it, how we think about it. Why multilateral and international commitments have so far failed, for the most part, not all, but for the most part, to normalise women’s participation in peace processes. And how we understand the narrative about women’s participation in peace processes, how institutional is it, what’s the – what’s behind it, what’s the purpose of it, why it matters, why it doesn’t matter, what’s the real – what are the real issues here?
So, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to turn to each of the speakers to – and say a few words about them and ask each of them to say a few words about what they think about these issues, and then we’re going to get into a little bit of a conversation, and then we’re going to go out to the room and ask people for their views, their questions, their comments, and any insights that they might like to share.
So, Wajd, if I could start with you. You’re a post-recovery specialist at Peace Track Initiative, PTI, and it’s a Yemeni NGO, founded and staffed by Yemeni women. You hold a Master degree in one of our best universities, which is the University of Bradford in Peace, Conflict and Development, and you’ve had over ten years’ work experience in Humanitarian, another NGO. You’ve worked on projects in Prodigy Systems, which is one of the local companies in Yemen. And, during your work, you’ve led monitoring and evaluation projects with partners, such as the World Food Programme, the World Bank, UNICEF and USAID.
Awino, you are the Chair for the Centre of Gender Studies at SOAS, CGS. You teach and you carry out research in the nexus between gender, sexuality, security and nation or state-making projects, and I’m glad you separate those two out, it’s very important, as they occur in conflict and post-conflict societies. Now, prior to your appointment at the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, and you’ve worked in the development sector, across various regions in Africa for over a decade, supporting women’s rights organisations and local movements in building local capacities for peace, and this remains absolutely central to the work that you do today.
So, we’re absolutely delighted that both of you could be here and share with us your experiences, your views and how you might see how we could develop this going forward. So, Wajd, why don’t you begin.
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming and I thank you for Chatham House for hosting us and telling us our experience as Yemeni women, trying to bring peace to our country, which is suffering from war, five years now. So, before talking about our roles as PTI, I would like to tell you that Yemen, as a country, is not a host state for women rights. There are a lot of discriminatory laws against women and the perhaps radical society that believe on men powers and the guardianship rules. So, even if – at political level, their participance is really, really limited. So, after the war, the situation getting worse and women are often the more – the worst affected in this war. They exposed to sexual violence; their husbands, their childrens, they get killed and detained, and they leave them alone without any support.
However, we at PTI are wanting to look at women not as victims. We wanted to look at them as strength women, to focus on the resilience in this war. So, we have been calling on, including women in peace talks. It was surprisingly in the peace track – actually in Yemen we have three tracks, track one, track two and track three. In track one, it was – there was only two women among 26 and only one woman among the advisory team. So, we felt that why they excluded women? They should be in the – on the table, discussing the situation of the country.
So, unfortunately, the UN envoy suggested to have a group of consultation for women. They are apart, they will not be in the – on the table of the peace process, but they will have, like, a time to feed information to the UN. So, in track two, we led that consultation process. We nominated women to be in that negotiations. We always go without any invitation and we claim our place and we said, “It is our right and we have to be there, whether you want it or not, it’s our place.” So, this is regarding the participation.
We hardly support – we strongly support women, even on the community level, those who are on living the war, there are a lot of women, they work on different files. There are women, they work on detainee’s files, women they work on exchange of prisoners and women are working on the – one of the women, they called herself Mother of Abductees. So, they are exposing to high risk, working there, and we just support them to continue their great work towards the peace and towards – to make the world know about what’s going on in Yemen.
So, we also, at PTI, we have developed agenda about women peace and security. In this agenda, we called for a ceasefire, opening the gates for the humanitarian, trying to include women in the security sector, and a lot of things mentioned in the – in this agenda. So, also we worked – we have some of our programmes, called protection programmes. As you know that women in the – in conflict, they exposed to a lot of abuse and violence and we try to release those womens – to release them and relocate them in other countries. Some of them are activists, human right defenders, women talking about peace, trying to bring peace. So, under pressure from us, they released them, but on a condition not to work on human rights or even talk about the peace.
So, this is – it’s really hard, it’s really sad, but we believe that women should be on the table and we created a network called Women Solidarity At Work, that contain a lot, about 300 women, participated – some of them participated individually and the others with their organisations. The aim of this network is just to make collective support of women. They – we support each other, trying to help each other, bringing our voice to the world and, yeah, this is briefly what we do at PTI, since it established in 2017, it just a new organisations, but we had a lot of works on the ground with the women.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thank you very much indeed, Wajd. Awino, please, you know, tell us something, from your perspective. You’ve been involved in quite a lot of peacebuilding processes. You’ve seen all sorts of different attempts at trying to integrate what women might bring to the table. How do you see progress? We’ve nearly 20 years since Resolution 1325, have you seen any impact from 1325? Has it been something that’s helped you in your work?
Dr Awino Okech
Yes, I will also join my sister in thanking Chatham House for the invitation and I welcome the discussion that will come between all of us later on.
Let me start by saying that of course we must claim 1325, because 1325 is a product of women’s movements and feminist movements’ work. We also recognise that policy frameworks, such as this, the moment that they’re negotiated as part of international global arrangements, they lose the sort of political strength that they had, in terms of what women’s movements thought that they would achieve, in terms of really enabling the structural change and transformation that feminists have sought to pursue by engaging the United Nations, by engaging regional institutions, such as the African Union on the Continent.
So, I’m going to claim 1325, on subsequent policy frameworks, because that’s our work, that’s our labour. It might not necessarily be delivering the kinds of things that we wanted to do, because that’s what happens when policy frameworks become policy frameworks, but we must retain and continue to occupy those spaces because, if you don’t occupy them, other people will occupy them and do whatever it is that they want to do with them.
So, I’m saying that women at the peace table and all of this dialogue about inclusion and participation is important, but what we know, from the African Continent, is that it’s critical for us not to confuse the strategy with the end goal. Being at the table is not the end goal. We must also recognise that the lessons that we have taken from doing feminist work has been that the table in itself is a problem, right? The reason why we are there at that table is because it has been constructed by other people as the site around which the dividends and – of the new state or the dividends of the new nation are being negotiated around and between powerful actors. More often than not, we know that the women are not constituted or constructed as those powerful actors.
So, you’re participating at a peace table from a point of inequality already, because you’re not the one who has set the terms on which that discussion is going to occur. So, if we are calling for participation and inclusion at the peace table, let’s recognise it’s a strategy, it’s not the end goal. Our task really should be to disrupt and destabilise the ways in which the construction of the new state is being – the debates around the construction of the new state is being heard.
We cannot, and our voices cannot be siloed and, again, I’m drawing from lessons from the African Continent, to simply conversations around the extent of violence and experiences of violence, as the only route through which women’s participation can occur, because we know that our participation in society is not simply limited to our experiences as women. Yes, our experiences as women tells society something about what it means to experience insecurity or what it means to think about security as somebody who occupies a woman’s body, and that by paying attention to how I experience insecurity, we can think in much broader ways of what security means.
To give a very simple and practical example, when I moved here from Nairobi, one of the things that I had to reorganise myself around was that I could walk around the streets at 11:00pm and I didn’t have to be looking around, because the streets were well-lit. I had a perception that the streets are more secure. Now, I know that there have been several incidents of knifing and burglaries in the very neighbourhood that I live, but this is a perception, right, that we have around what notions of security look like in the developed world. But I know that when men and women walk in the streets, the things that we think about, in terms of our safety and security, as women, differ markedly from men, when they think about their safety and security. And so, when we are talking about our inclusion, it’s about bringing these sets of experiences so that we are thinking about a holistic approach to security, peacebuilding and nation building.
The second point that I want to make is that peacebuilding architectures and structures are purposefully designed to ensure that it’s only the voices of the powerful and the elite that are heard. And so, it is critical that even as we push for our engagement and participation in these processes, we need to find spaces, as part of feminist and movement building work, to reimagine what these peacebuilding architectures could look like.
So, while I absolutely hold the importance of engaging this institution, I think a central part of our work, when we do our lobbying and advocacy, is not to push for the transportation of templates from one conflict to another in the same form, and somebody like [inaudible – 15:33] speaks very powerfully about this, right? So, there’s a template that exists, you go and you do the peace talks, you go and do a TRC, you go and hold elections, a constitutional review here, DDR there, and now you have a new government to go off and become developed or go off and do not get into conflict again. But this is a template that is transported from Kosovo, it’s transported to Liberia, it’s transported to Syria, assuming that this one model works in any context, irrespective of the differences that actually create, or the factors rather, that create conflicts in each of these contexts.
So, a gender approach or an inclusive approach to thinking about a peacebuilding architecture is one that reimagines what this architecture is supposed to do, and not assuming that the framework, as it currently exists, will serve our purpose, our purposes equally, given the differences in our context.
I’ll leave it for there.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Yeah. I mean really what you’re talking about there is really a bespoke approach, isn’t it? You’re – what you’re saying is, you know, each situation’s different, each culture, each society is different, each history, each conflict is different, the experiences are different, so why do we keep doing this cookie cutter, one size fits all approach?
And I think, you know, so the question I have to both of you really is, you know, what is it that women bring perhaps in that discussion? You know, if we have had a set of approaches that have used these sort of templates, as you call them, from other conflicts, I mean, obviously there are things that can inspire and we can borrow from each other and do some cross conflict, cross cultural learning, but to actually imagine that you can just take a particular framework and impose it on everyone seems rather silly, doesn’t it? So, do women help break that up, that type of thinking, or, you know, are women continually left on the sidelines, as we keep hearing, put into track two processes, you know, given the crumbs from the table, if you like, that table that we’re supposed to be at?
Dr Awino Okech
Do you want to go?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Go.
Dr Awino Okech
I think in my view – let me give the pragmatic answer and then let me give the sort of radical answer. The pragmatic answer is that the importance of women in those spaces is about the differences in experiences between women and men, and what paying attention and listening to women’s stories tells you about society and what is required to rebuild a society that’s more equal.
There’s a tendency to think about conflicts, to think about the challenges in our societies as not catalysed, as not driven by the gender inequalities in those societies. So, we see the inequalities as not gendered and that the problems in our society are only about ethnicity, they’re only about race, they’re only about religion, and yet, those divisions are reproduced in gendered bodies. They’re reproduced in how we organise people into who needs to marry who and who cannot marry who. They’re reproduced in ideas about ethnic purity and how you cannot marry across communities. And it’s women’s bodies that bear the burden of this societal controls and bear the burden of the ethnic cleansing that therefore arises when a society decides that we are going to cleanse one group because we want a pure nation that is constructed only around this particular race or this particular community.
So, paying attention to how gender is deeply connected to all forms of inequalities, in my view, is what women add to the conversation. They allow us to rebuild a society that is thinking about equalities writ large, rather than equalities as something that is only calculated or understood around the thing that political elite assume is the problem within that society, which is often about power sharing, which is often about the ways in which ethnicity and race, in some of our societies are politicised for particular goals.
A much more radical answer would be to argue that what I would hope that a conversation enabled by feminists, not just women, but by feminists within peacebuilding processes does is to reimagine gender relations in our societies. And I think scholars have argued this for a very long time and practitioners, that in situations of conflict, the society’s social relationships are destabilised. We are no longer thinking about women’s work as being one thing and men’s work as being another. We are mobilising people to take up arms. We are mobilising people to do the work that is required as part of whether it’s achieving freedom, depending on which side of the sort of armed group you are in, or whichever side of the conflict that you are in. But this window closes, immediately the peacebuilding process occurs.
So, you can think about it in the context of Egypt, for instance. You have a very vibrant mobilisation of people across society, pushing for a revolution, as they did. You have women and men in the streets together championing for change, but the minute change happens, you’re told, “My friend, go back into the bedroom, go back into the house, that is your domain.” And so, for me, a much more radical process of transformation is one that keeps this window long – open long enough to allow us to have meaningful debates around shifts in structural inequalities in our society, that do not end up in a situation where a particular category or group of people in a society continue to remain oppressed, yet the society’s argued to be now moving towards a better trajectory of development, equality and growth. So, for me, thinking about growth in society also has to be about asking the questions, are our women and girls experiencing this growth in the same way? Or is it growth that is only benefitting a particular group in the society?
Dr Patricia Lewis
And Wajd, what do you think, I mean, in Yemen, how do you frame this particular issue? How do you think about this situation, as you go forward? How are you creating a vision for Yemen in the future?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Problem in Yemen that this society are believing that women’s role are really limited in the house and they should not be included in other – in political or in the workplace. But if we can see now what’s happening on the ground, women are financially supporting the families, even if there is men in the family, they are leading.
So, this is the – the bias standards they have is really making us questioning why they don’t want women to lead and to be part of this process, while she’s already leading on the ground. She’s leading, she’s trying to release detainees, she’s – her voice is always – they don’t afraid of being even detained. They are speaking loudly, they want their freedom, they want peace. So, it’s – the problem is on the perspective of gendered roles. It’s inherited in the community and it’s hard. It needs a lot of time. It needs time, so people they can understand women are qualified enough to lead on this.
Dr Patricia Lewis
And you’ve both worked with the UN, you’ve both worked with, you know, the World Food Programme, the World Bank, etc., all of those big institutions and, you know, with Resolution 1325, with the way in which these institutions now try to frame these issues, they talk about gender equality, they talk about the role of women, what do you see on the ground? How do you see that in – do women come there right at the beginning, right at the centre, along with men, or do women get pushed to the side again and again and again? What – d0 you see any change in the institutions for these types of discussions, Wajd?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
No.
Dr Patricia Lewis
You’re shaking your head, it’s no.
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Unfortunately, no.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Not at all?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Not at all because it’s written in their mandates, agendas, that women should be there, but what I’ve seen, during my ten years working in humanitarian aid, they just want to include women as beneficiaries, that’s it. This is the whole subject.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Beneficiaries of what? Their largesse?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Getting assistance, like food, dignity, toolkits, and this stuff, but it’s also a limited role. When we see what the – these NGOs dead in the ground, they did nothing. Still women are seeking for freedom, seeking for their rights and even in workplaces, the salaries are different. So, I don’t see any changes. It’s just a word on paper, not implemented on the ground, yeah.
Dr Patricia Lewis
And, Awino, do you have the same experience or do you have a different experience of these organisations?
Dr Awino Okech
No, I think it’s the same. The reality – the reason why the kinds of changes that we want to see around gender equality take longer to achieve is – the kind of radical changes take longer to achieve is because patriarchy is always shapeshifting as well, right? The minute you make moves in one area, it reorganises itself to block other routes.
So, for instance, the ideas around women’s participation and inclusion, you find that bastardised through sort of talking participation or the participation of women who are connected to the political elite. You know, so, yes, you have bodies there that look like the ones you wanted to have there, but they’re not necessarily the kinds of people that are going to push for the changes that women’s movements, who have been – who actually led to the inclusion of these kinds of, you know, provisi0ns wanted. You know, so it’s talking participation and the bastardisation of some of these provisions.
But I must argue that the importance of community organising, in a lot of these countries it remains critical, because even if women are pushing for change on the sidelines or are engaging on the sidelines of formal processes, that pressure remains critical. It remains essential to ensuring that the majority of women’s voices in any country are heard and, for me, especially given the trans sort of national nature of conflicts that we see in a lot – in many parts of the African Continent, the importance of transnational connections is also useful, because a lot of the things that we see in Kenya today, Uganda, and activists already experienced it, they have learnt their lesson, so there needs activist experiences, they’ve learnt their lesson, so there’s no need for Kenyans to come and repeat the same mistakes that activists already had before.
You know, so this sort of transnational connections and activism is also becoming a very important way to champion and push for the kinds of changes that we want, both at a regional level, but also, globally, yeah.
Dr Patricia Lewis
So, I mean, it’s – if you look at like the structures that we have created on the international scene and you look at the types of initiatives that have been taken, like 1325, actually, the picture’s quite bleak. But if you look at the community level, if you look at the real peacebuilding from the communities, from the people involved, then the picture gets very different, and you’re the embodiment of that in a way, Wajd.
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Yeah, exactly. Exactly, like, especially in more context, the men are always in the frontlines of the world, so, who’s working in the community? Who’s building? Who’s rebuilding the economy of the country? They are the women. So, yeah, I mean, women are doing their efforts and they try so hard, seeking, struggling to get that space, but still, the agent is different, maybe, I don’t know, there is something – they always claim that you have two spaces in the Parliament. You have opportunity to work. You have – the little they give us, they see it as, oh, we gave you. You have to be thankful for this.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Yeah, give you an inch, you’ll take a mile.
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Exactly.
Dr Patricia Lewis
I know. I know. I think we can all hear you there, I think, in this room. So, what I’m going to do now is turn over to our audience here, which is – oh, it’s grown, since I came in, this is great. So, we have microphones, so I suggest what you do, if you wish to make a contribution, if you wish to ask a question or whatever, and try to catch my eye and I’ll try to look for you. So, I think we have – do we have someone over there? No? Okay, yes, please, if we can take – if you can wait for the microphone and if you could hold the microphone quite close to your mouth, it’s really helpful.
Rachel Minor
Yes, thank you for your comments.
Dr Patricia Lewis
And if you could say who you are as well.
Rachel Miner
Rachel Miner with [inaudible – 29:37] International. I just have some questions regarding spaces away from the table. I’ve found that, as we work on international projects and we try to create these spaces, there’s a really fine line between creating the space for the table and creating the table inadvertently for other people and their peacebuilding processes. Can you talk to me about strategies that you’ve utilised in coming in, you know, as this external partner, as the NGO or as the academic, how do you create those spaces, without infringing on an organic peacebuilding process? Thank you.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Yes, so, what did you say, creating a space at the table and creating the table. So, how do you build a table, which you can control perhaps?
Dr Awino Okech
Well, let me try and be politically correct here. I think that the question about thinking about power, we all have to think about power and our own, you know, sort of positionality when we’re coming into any space. But I think the challenge is that come with externals as opposed to locals, even though we are academics or not based in the country is very different, right? So, me coming into a community to work with my community, to build peace, is a very different kettle of fish to an American or a Briton coming in to try and do that work. The kind of power that we wield is very different. The kind of legitimacy that I have in the community and with the people is very different. So, I think it’s important to put that on the table immediately.
The second thing is also, for me, is always about recognising that in any movement building processes, we are all leveraging different strengths, right? So, it’s important to not walk into a space where community organisers or local groups are engaging in conversations that they feel are critical to how they want to see a particular process and move forward, and you jump into that conversation, without necessarily being invited into it.
I think my influence can play out at a very different level, that builds on the work that local community organisers are doing, while community organisers can be allowed to continue with their processes, without me necessarily interfering or academics or policymakers interfering in these processes. I’m arguing that multipronged efforts end up producing the kinds of results that we desire, without us always seeking to put our hands in each and every pot, and trying to control the outcomes of each and every process.
The third thing that I would argue is that listening is a very powerful tool and participating in spaces within which you do not necessarily have the same kind of power, because you’re not from there, the issues might not necessarily be familiar to you, listen. Walk into the space, listen and be invited to contribute in the ways in which the locals want you to contribute and to honour. When you’re invited, to honour the invitation, to contribute in very specific ways and to honour the invitation to also exit the space when you’re asked to exit the space, yeah.
Wajd Saleh Barahim
From our experience, we created the table for us, we were not invited to any table and they were not welcoming for this. So, the input we are providing is totally different than the input they have. So, by this way, we created our space. In that table, we nominate women from different part – from different sectors, like there are Economist, Journalist, and political people, human rights, so all those people, they come up with solutions that’s totally different than what they have. So, in that sense, we create the space. We let them hear the voices of women and what they want to bring the peace on the table. So, I believe that the input, the angle from where you see things is totally important and crucial in creating the space. Respecting the others even, other parties, political parties, is really important. In our space, we have all women from different parties, sometimes they get fight with each other, but at the end, we respect the point of view of them, so we can get – come up with a solution. And this is what I think is really important in our network, that we are not excluding one party, we just collect them all in one table and have one solution, yeah.
Dr Patricia Lewis
So, we have somebody at the back, please.
Duda
Hello, good evening. Thank you for the chance to speak. My name is Duda. I’m doing a Masters in Peacebuilding and Security. I, in my time studying peacebuilding, I’ve noticed there is a really strong narrative of going back to peace, during peace talks, which most certainly implies a context that was unsafe or unequal, which is, from what I gather, one of the really difficult points in bringing about a gender unbiased peacebuilding process. And so, I’d like to ask if – how would you attempt to break free from this narrative or are there any strategies that you have employed or would like to employ in future peacebuilding processes? Thank you.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Who wants to have a stab at that?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Can I get what you really mean in your question?
Duda
In terms of a strategy that could break free from a nara – like a really strong patriarchal narrative, such as going back to peace, because going back to peace just, if you don’t politicise it, just means going back to a time when we weren’t at war. But, to a feminist, in a feminist point of view, it just shows that you’re not actually paying attention to the insecurity of women. So, how would you, or how have you, attempted to break free from that strategy, that narrative?
Dr Patricia Lewis
About how you perceive this state of peace and what sort of creation you want.
Wajd Saleh Barahim
First of all, the definition of ‘feminist’ is misunderstood in the community. When we talk about feminist or feminising the peace process, which is our mission in Peace Track Initiative, they totally understand it in a way, like, we just want the peace to be around women. So, feminist, in general, it’s not about women, it’s about us, like me, you, my son, my daughter, my sister, my brother, the whole community. So, this is what they have to understand that when we call about – when we call of inclusion of women, that means we bring the voice of all the community. Usually, men when they talk in their peace negotiation, they just discuss at political level, they don’t go down to the community level, but women, they are always caring about what’s happening in the ground, what’s happening in the community. So, what we do actually, trying to shift this misunderstanding and let them know what the feminist leadership means to…
Dr Awino Okech
I think we are still working to get there, right? That would be the simplest answer that we’re still working to get there. The more pragmatic answer would be to argue that if you think about what we now consider safe policy changes, such as debates around security sector reform or gender necessarily, if you think about debates around strengthening legal provisions for sexual violence and other forms of violence, strengthening judiciaries, thinking about women’s leadership in Parliament and state structures, one would argue those are all processes designed to try and ensure the patriarchy is unseated, in some way or another.
Whether it does that successfully in all countries in the ways that we would want, that’s, you know, that’s up to the country and that’s up to the strength of the women’s movement post, you know, post-conflict or post the peacebuilding process. But my sort of – you know, when I want to see possibilities, I would argue that all of that work has been part of the process of saying that we are not going to continue with business as usual and that because violence is a continuum, we want to ensure that post-conflict, we recognise that this balance will still continue.
So, how do we ensure that the laws are actually dealing with it? How do you ensure that the Police, the Judiciary is equipped to deal with these forms of violence? How do we ensure that the Police services and other security services understand our own experiences of insecurity and respond to them effectively? You know, and those can be considered gains, those can be considered, you know, the sort of impact of women’s rights activists in a post-conflict environment. But to throw patriarchy out, we’re still working on it.
Dr Patricia Lewis
A work in progress. So, I have a couple of people here and then, also, two people at the back, so perhaps here first and then…
Hilde Rapp
Hilde Rapp, Centre for International Peacebuilding. First of all, I must apologise that I missed most of your talk because there was a casualty on the underground and I had great difficulty getting here, but that’s special, that women will actually make the effort to get where they think they need to be, whatever the circumstances.
What I’m picking up from you is the extraordinary resourcefulness and resilience of women to look for the opportunities that are actually opening up, despite all the difficulties and obstacles, and go for where it’s possible to make a difference. And, if I may, there are sort of two examples from Yemen and from Kenya, which maybe you already mentioned, where it was quite extraordinary, the courage with which women have proceeded. One was the editor of the Yemen Times, who was one of the Founder Editors with me of a women’s network called SAVE, which is Sisters Against Violent Extremism, it’s the first platform of women who said, “We, as mothers and as women, have a kind of prime, a role in preventing radicalisation.” And the other is in Kenya where women in a market where there was active conflict, got together and persuaded the men to not fight in the market, so that people could eat and that then, sort of, snowballed into a movement.
You probably know all about this, but what was significant about that, it’s not only that these women then became leaders in other peace processes, but that they could do this because they also got an enormous amount of international support and international visibility. They were supported by Peace Direct, which is, I don’t know whether anybody from them is here, and I just wondered whether you can say something more about that kind of broader landscape, from top down, a top down bottom up, in local and international co-operation? Thank you.
Dr Patricia Lewis
I’m just going to take one more question. Here, and please.
Harriet Martin
Hi, yes, I think it’s actually related to this point. I’m Harriet Martin, and I’ve just spent the last four years in Myanmar, where I’ve been part of a team, a small team running an international fund to support the peace process. And probably the most useful thing I did was in the last year, which was to setup, to facilitate a network of women outside of the peace process, because coming back to one of your points, Awino, which I found really interesting, is I think actually, donors no longer are going for the cookie cutter approach so much.
I think now, if you look at the pattern of peace processes, there is a much stronger leaning towards supporting national ownership, but the gender issue remains implicitly kind of unresolved in that approach, as much as it did in sort of, you know, over the last 20 years in which we had very much, you know, the cookie cutter approach, across the places that you named. And I think that what I found is that in Myanmar, there is very much, even though the peace process that we’re supporting there was nationally owned and defined, women were given the habitual supposedly 30% seats at a table of discussion, but that never happened. And so, a lot of the kind of – the energy was going towards trying to get women access to those seats, which, in a sense, were useless, it’s what you said, the table is the wrong place.
So, the network I facilitated actually, I began with investment bankers, women investment bankers, Parliamentarians, policymakers and I brought them into a space with the CSO women we were supporting in the peace process. And I wanted to ask you both, because donors can have a default setting to try and bring women into the formal process, but when we talk about inclusion, how far do we go, how much – how important is the private sector? How important is it for us to just rewrite the rules and move away from the formal process? Because I think it’s a very disempowering experience for most women across the world, being pushed into a male process like that.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Who wants to have a go at those two together?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Sorry?
Dr Patricia Lewis
Do you want to respond to…?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Okay. The role of the NGOs you mean? Honestly, I don’t see really roles on – of NGOs on the ground. They are talking of inclusion. They are talking about making peace, but the real effort is going from the community itself, but they are not recognised, and this is sometimes because of the control. Like, in Yemen, we have two sides: one side, the North is controlled by Houthis, who are very suppressing on people. They cannot even talk. They cannot even express what they want to say. So, community level, there is a lot of effort, though there are a lot of obstacles and struggle, but the international level, the NGOs, they don’t know about it. They are claiming that they understand the situation, but what is going on the ground, it’s not real, it’s not – they are not aware of it. So, I believe they have – they should go deep in the level communities, in the level of the community and see what’s going on, so to bring out the problems and solve it. So, so far, I don’t see any effort regarding this, it’s all about political level and that’s it.
Dr Patricia Lewis
So, Wajd, when you talk about the NGOs, what NGOs are you talking about? Give us some examples.
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Actually, UN, they have peacekeeping, peacebuilding, but this is what I mean, and they don’t have the efforts in the community. So, basically, I’m talking…
Dr Patricia Lewis
Do you mean the international NGOs, is that what you’re talking about?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Yeah, yeah, especially like UN, they have a Commission of peacebuilding, peacekeeping, but they don’t have any efforts, especially in the Middle – and in Yemen or Syria, so…
Dr Patricia Lewis
So, you’re talking about the disconnect between the international level… ?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Yeah, there is a big disconnection.
Dr Patricia Lewis
And the local level?
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Exactly, exactly. They are talking with the political level, who are already not in the country, like, for this example of Yemen, the government, who should be the powerful one, they are not in Yemen. They are based in Saudi Arabia, so – and they are talking with those people living in Saudi Arabia, which they have no connection what’s happening in Yemen. So, the context of Yemen is a bit complicated and this is what I mean by they have to involve more with people rather than talking with political level only. I believe that also interacting with several organisations is really important. They are the ones who’s facing difficulties, challenges, trying to solve problems with tribals, with the control of the extremism parties. So, yeah, there are a lot of interconnected things that need to be addressed.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Awino.
Dr Awino Okech
So, yes, I think, as I mentioned before, transnational work remains absolutely essential. And when you talk about transnational work, I’m thinking about work across countries on the African Continent, but also work that connects the African Continent to other contexts, whether that is in the Global North or other countries in the Global South, because the nature of our politics today means that a conflict maybe occurring in one particular place, but the actors that are generating that conflict are sitting elsewhere, and so we cannot sort of work in isolation.
I would sort of flag the work of Urgent Action Fund-Africa, which is a rapid response grant maker, that I think does fascinating work, in terms of providing immediate frontline support, in terms of grants, to women’s human rights defenders. They have a 72 hour turnaround period to get finances to women human rights defenders, in situations of urgent crisis, and they have supported women in Burundi, as part of the peacebuilding process, they have worked with women in Sudan just recently, supported women in Cameroon, Egypt, Tunisia. And this kind of work of shifting the modality of funding as well, where you don’t have to wait for a funding window and six months’ cycle for their proposal to be approved, it’s part of a response to recognising what it means to fund people in crisis, what it means to support movements at the frontline of conflict and at the frontline of crisis.
The second thing as well that is critical around the shift in this funding modalities by rapid response grant makers, such as UAF and others, is that the nature of conflict today also means that it doesn’t look the same way, right? So, we are talking about asymmetrical conflict. We are talking about different kinds of extremism, but we’re also talking about increasing attacks by governments themselves on their people. So, the greatest threat to a lot of people today is not Al-Shabaab, it’s not Boko Haram, it’s your own government, your own government that is creating conditions that make it difficult for dissent to thrive. The terminology that’s popularly used today is the ‘closure of civic space’. So, you see this closure occurring in different ways, whether that is through extra judicial killings, whether that is through the muzzling of human rights defenders, the creation of communication laws, security laws, that are purposefully designed to mute and manage dissent of any form in a country. So, the way in which you think about conflict today also has to shift, because it’s not – it does not look the same way in different contexts.
Absolutely we must move beyond talking just to NGOs and local community organisations. The question is, when we are talking to corporations, which we must talk to, given all of the debates around public/private partnership, their role of corporations, for instance, in the SDGs, you know, the question for me always is, what conversation are you having with them? What are we asking them to do? Particularly in contexts where some of these corporations are the source of the problem, you know? So, how does this inclusion and engaging them and bringing together, as part of dialogue, is part of resolving the problems that they themselves are creating in communities or does it end up being a situation where we legitimise them and launder their images, as part of the process of saying we’re being inclusive and lodging our conversation? So, for me, that’s often the tension, in terms of engaging the private sector, because in some of our countries, they’re a big source of the problem, that’s one.
But secondly, we are also seeing an increasing situation where the entry of private sector actors into the development terrain, rather than lead to greater efficiency and effectiveness, as it is argued private sector brings, it’s leading to increasing privatisation and leading to increasing inequalities. So, yes, the hospitals are efficient, yes, you’re getting water every day in the taps, but if you can’t afford it, you don’t get it. So, how does it help? Yeah.
Dr Patricia Lewis
That’s great. So, there was some, here we go, two people, please.
Keira Beads
Hi, Keira Beads, Chatham House Member. It’s really interesting listening to both of you speak and actually thinking about peacebuilding and the exclusion of women from conflict – post-conflict situations isn’t a new situation. If I look back to my own history, as an Irish person, women were central to the revolution in 1916 through 22. Indeed, the first woman elected to the British Parliament was an Irish revolutionary, Countess Markievicz, and, post the conflict, post the peacebuilding, women were completely cut out and one of the main routes to cutting them out was the bringing in of religion, and in Ireland’s case, the Catholic Church and women were completely excluded and the religion was used as a mechanism to exclude women and to put them down, and it’s taken us 100 years kind of to get ourselves back to a level playing field.
And, indeed, if you look in Northern Ireland, women played a central role, from both sides of the community, coming together to the peace process and they’re often left out, forgotten, and it’s only ever the men of both religious sides that are remembered, commemorated and celebrated. The women are often forgotten. And I’m just wondering, from your experience and your context, what role does religion still play and do you see it playing in peacebuilding post-conflict and that being used as a mechanism to put down and exclude women?
Dr Patricia Lewis
Great, if you could pass the microphone onto – oh, sorry.
Carlena
Hi, I’m Carlena. I would like to ask…
Dr Patricia Lewis
Could you put the microphone on?
Carlena
Oh yeah, sorry. Hi, I’m Carlena. I would like to ask, we just started an initiative, small voluntary base, on the community level, that we have a peace school where there’s young girls who family affected by extremism can have a dialogue with the very extreme views, like people who are against it, and – but there’s a problem also with the grant, like, for example, we have to be selective because, like, Muslim extremists would not, like, accept, like, a foreign country’s donor or something, and they will be more, you know, questioning you, what’s your motive behind this dialogue?
We’re now just starting with our own pocket funding and then – and what are you suggesting and how do we strategize in growing and strengthening the community level? And, like, is there any, you know, best practice that you’ve found on the ground, on like how a community level approach can also influence, like, how the country do strategize their peacebuilding activities? Yeah, thank you.
Dr Patricia Lewis
And if we could take the last question, because we’re coming up to seven o’clock, that would be helpful. Thank you.
Emily
Thank you. Hi, I’m Emily, and I’m a PhD student, and I just quickly wondered whether you could expand on how the insecurities of globalisation are addressed in these spaces, because it seems to me that with a potentially narrow security frame, victims here are shaped as passivity and, like, the informal sectors, which we know are often feminised or shadow economies are synonymised with terror. So, I’m thinking mainly on my own work in West Africa, but these groups that end up being lumped as terror or insurgent groups. But that’s me, thank you.
Dr Patricia Lewis
Thank you, that is a lot there. So, I don’t know who wants to have a go first. Maybe, Awino, you could have a go and then we could go to Wajd.
Wajd Saleh Barahim
Regarding the religion role, yeah, in the case of Yemen and especially the Middle East in general, there was cause that erupt the conflict, but then it became like religious and ethnic conflict between Sunni and Shiite and, yeah, so it’s making a different role than you have in your countries. They spread people, they divided people and they make the situation worse. So now, we are calling for excluding the religion from the political field because religion is making people separate and everyone wants to have the role, according to their religion beliefs. So, this is what is happening in the Middle East in general, yeah. We cannot talk about religion in peace talks. We try to avoid this part because it’s bringing a lot of issues, yeah.
Dr Awino Okech
I think, depending on which context you’re in, the mobilisation of certain ideas of religious fundamentalism will show up much more strongly than others. So, if you look at the Horn of Africa, the argument that links, for instance, groups, such as Al-Shabaab, as being connected to particular notions of extremist Islam ideas or, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood in the North as, you know, an extremist version of an extremist interpretation of Islam, you know, it can show up in that way.
But I often argue that the people that we are not paying attention to are the ones who are actually doing the most dangerous work. And think of the Christian fundamentalists, right, so they’re operating in the shadows and everyone is talking about Islam, yet if you look at some of the very dangerous prosperity gospels that are gong on across a range of African countries, the ways in which a Christian organisations are capturing high education systems, the ways in which they are capturing the state and influencing state decisions, and enlarging conversations around morality and even restricting the debates around bodily autonomy for women, whether that is occurring through abortion or through this idea that Africa is homophobic, you know, which are transported notions from, you know, evangelicals, from the US, who come and find bedfellows in the African Continent and then reshape this notion of Africans being homophobic and excite people into creating ridiculous laws that actually create more harm, not just for the people they think of as queer. But for everyone else, because of their expansive interpretations of what morality is, rooted in notions of Christianity and religiosity.
So, I often argue, let’s pay attention to these folks that are operating under the radar because we’re obsessed with thinking about Islamic fundamentalism. Actually, it’s the evangelicals that are actually doing much more scary things in Africa and you should be looking at them. And their networks are increasing, they are increasing across Europe, they are linked back to the Continent, they are linked back to the US, and that’s why you see all this rise of far-right parties and all of these institutions that are mobilising notions about anti-gender conversations, you know, the closure of feminist centres and gender study centres in Hungary, in Turkey, these are all connected, you know, and I think that’s why our actions have to be joined up, rather than occurring separately.
Absolutely we cannot think about global conflict or conflicts today, without the connections to the larger geopolitical dynamics and this whole notion of state capture. It’s something that I’ve often found as a useful framework for thinking about how global actors find home and connections with local political elite to do whatever it is they want to do, to the detriment of the citizens of that country. And, of course, finding also the mobility and usefulness of conversations around insecurity and terrorism, as a ripe and a fertile ground for governments to then shut up any kinds of conversations about transparency and accountability, because no, no, no, we need so-and-so in that region, that is the country that we maintain stability because everyone else around them is crumbling.
We saw this in Burkina Faso, right? You had Compaoré there for decades, his citizens didn’t want him, but no, no, no, the Global North needed Burkina Faso as a stable state and therefore, you support a regime that is unhelpful to the citizens.
Dr Patricia Lewis
I feel like we’re only just getting going, but I have to close, and I’m so sorry. This has been a fascinating discussion and you both so generously gave of your knowledge, your ideas, your expertise and your creative thought, and I think we’ve been very lucky to be in this room tonight. So, thank you both so much for what was a really interesting discussion. Thank you also to everybody who came tonight, but also, particularly those who were able to ask questions and contribute their knowledge as well.
So, you know, we’ve been 20 years nearly in October. I think we will mark 1325 in October somewhat differently. It will be of course Chatham House’s 100th, you know, it takes a while, that’s what we’ll say, and we’re not there yet by any means. But it’s an issue I think, which is so fundamentally important and I still get the feeling that people who are – who imagine themselves to be the decision-makers, shall we say, just don’t get it.
So, thank you all so much, it’s been a pleasure having you here [applause].
