Want World Peace? Bring Women to the Table
Want World Peace? Bring Women to the Table
Today marks the end of the 16 Days of Activism to End Gender-Based Violence, a global campaign by feminist activists to not only raise awareness and action to end gender violence, but also, importantly, to create an understanding that gender-based violence is a human rights abuse. This is an important rhetorical strategy, given historical reluctance by individuals and institutions to intervene in cases of violence against women and girls as a “private” or in some cases “traditional” matter. The significance of the 16 Days Campaign is linking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women—on Nov. 26, the start of the campaign—to Human Rights Day, on Dec. 10.
Human Rights Day commemorates the day the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. At the time, the world was emerging from the chaos of World War II, and the declaration was primarily motivated as a function of global peacebuilding. Sixty-seven years later, that motivation has only increased in significance.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of people in need of humanitarian aid has tripled in the past decade; 80 percent of those are affected by armed conflict. Displacement is currently at the highest number on record: 59.5 million people. Girls and women are particularly vulnerable, displaced at higher numbers than ever and subject to unspeakable human rights violations including rape, child and forced marriage, and slavery, as we have seen in the latest round of horrific violence by the Islamic State.
Yet women are also an incredible force for peace, and recent scholarship points more strongly than ever to their power as peacebuilders. A recent study of 40 global peace processes shows that women increased the chances of agreements being reached, that their participation in talks contributed to better implementation of recommendations, and that they helped ensure the durability of peace. Perhaps most importantly, women repeatedly—and successfully—pushed for talks to take place where they weren’t, or to resume or conclude when they had stalled.
Still, women are routinely excluded from the peace table. From 1992 to 2011, less than four percent of participants in peace agreements and less than 10 percent of negotiators at peace talks were women, according to U.N. data.
. . . .
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/12/10/want-world-peace-bring-women-to-the-table/
= new reply since forum marked as read
