By Bénédicte Santoire
From October 23 to 26, I travelled to New York City with the Canadian delegation to the United Nations (UN) and Canada’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Ambassador for the annual Women, Peace and Security (WPS) week. There, I was privileged to be a civil society representative for the WPSN-C and participate in some official meetings with the delegation, such as the Security Council Open Debates and side events.
This is the second time a civil society representative has been invited to join a delegation led by the WPS Ambassador Jacqueline O’Neill.
This year’s WPS Week happened in a tense atmosphere. With alarming concerns, feminists around the world observe the rise of armed conflicts, nuclear threats, military spending, arms proliferation, irreversible climate change, democratic backsliding and far-right, anti-feminist movements. In the backdrop of WPS discussions happen atrocious violations of human rights in which women and vulnerable populations suffer disproportionately and distinctively: in Palestine & Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Haiti, Armenia & Azerbaijan and Ukraine, to name only a few.
In the current “polycrisis,” this tense atmosphere pushes us to reflect on the evolution, transformation and institutionalization of this agenda, which, at the outset, we should recall, had radically emancipatory roots. What are the limits of this agenda in our current times?
Day by day, here are some highlights and personal reflections of my stay in New York.
Day 1
The first event I attended was organized by several non-governmental organizations, along with the Permanent Missions of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Republic of Albania, and the United Kingdom. Tackling the question of women’s political participation as a critical pillar of the WPS agenda, three women activists from Democratic Republic of Congo (Claudine Tsongo), South Sudan (Esther Soma) and Iraq (Rasha Al Aqueedi) shared their experiences of electoral processes in the context of implementation of peace agreements and shrinking civic spaces while providing key recommendations.
A takeaway from this event was the importance of quota systems and electoral monitoring mechanisms in conflict-affected countries, capacity-building & training for women to run electoral campaigns and the need to address backlash against women politicians. A panellist raised the systemic importance of working with women as both candidates and voters in electoral processes dominated by men and the positive use of social media.
The following event was a conversation between Colombian feminists and peace activists organized by LIMPAL Colombia and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s (WILPF) Women, Peace and Security Programme. In the backdrop of the new Government of Gustavo Petro and their approach of la paz total, Diana Salcedo Lopez, Natalia Chaves Monroy, and Elizabeth Taylor Jay exchanged reflections on the ongoing implementation and territorialization of the peace process in Colombia, as well as the current process for the first National Action Plan. WILPF’s new director, Sylvie Jacqueline Ndongmo, provided her advocacy experience for Resolution 1325 in Cameroon and the importance of building alliances and training the media and civil society.
The third event of the day, organized by the Permanent Missions of Italy and the Kingdom of Tonga, UN Women, and in partnership with Mediterranean Women Mediators Network (MWMN), Pacific Women Mediators Network (PWMN) and WIIS-Italy, was on women-led and climate-informed mediation. With representatives and insights from Italy, various Pacific Islands, Australia, Mexico, Kenya, Tanzania, Turkey, Kosovo, NATO, and OSCE, the experts present discussed ways in which donors, for example, can better create synergies with and support women-led mediation networks: flexible long-term funding, trust-building between stakeholders, disaggregated data collection, capacity-building of women mediators for thematic expertise, cooperation with regional organizations and the need to support “what’s already there” to avoid duplication of work was raised among the strategies needed for that goal.
A takeaway from this event is that it is clear that women-led mediation networks are not a trend; they are here to stay. They show the value of recognizing women’s leadership at the forefront of responding to complex intersecting crises, as they are the ones pinpointing new problems and establishing early-warning mechanisms for conflict prevention and other crises.
Organized by the Permanent Mission of Colombia to the UN, the fourth event of the day was a participatory meeting on the first Colombian National Action Plan on WPS, where Ambassador O’Neill delivered a speech. We heard from the NAP process, ongoing since October 2022, which combined a multi-stakeholder, rooted territorial, intersectional, and antiracist approach. Currently at the stage of harmonization with State structures, the process so far combines more than 1500 women participated across the country in 32 departments and six regions, including queer, Indigenous, disabled and Afro-Colombian women. As this was shown before by WPSN-C’s chair visit to Colombia, there is a lot that Canada can learn from Colombia’s WPS approach, including its constant dialogue and inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and expertise in the NAP.
Finally, the last event of the day was about LGBTI-inclusive responses to humanitarian crises, specifically in Ukraine, since the full-scale Russian invasion. Organized by Outright International, NGO Women Association Sphere from Kharkiv, and Action Aid, it was the only event of WPS Week that specifically tackled the question of LGBTQI+ communities in conflict-affected settings and their needs and challenges. The silence on this issue during WPS Week points, on the one hand, to the urgent need for “queering” WPS since, in armed conflicts, forced displacements and humanitarian catastrophes, queer communities are most of the time excluded and often left without adequate protection and humanitarian assistance. The rise of anti-gender and conservative coalitions inside and outside the UN points to the urgency of protecting hard-won gains. Panellists pointed out that the push to introduce this topic in a Security Council resolution, for example, would lead to more losses than gains, given the threats to this agenda in recent years by Security Council permanent members such as Russia, the USA (during Trump era) and China, particularly in regard to the progressive and inclusive language of the agenda.
The views in this blog are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the WPSN-C or its membership.
Bénédicte Santoire is a Ph.D Candidate and Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda in the post-Soviet space, where she has conducted more than 80 interviews with Ukrainian, Moldovan, Georgian and Armenian women. She sits on the Steering Committee of the WPSN-C.
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