Civil Society, Peace, and Power by Cortright David;Greenberg Melanie;Stone Laurel;Stone Laurel; & Melanie Greenberg & Laurel Stone

Author:Cortright, David;Greenberg, Melanie;Stone, Laurel;Stone, Laurel; & Melanie Greenberg & Laurel Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Chapter 7

The Role of Women in Regional Peace and Security

Experiences from the Pacific

Sharon Bhagwan-Rolls and Laurel Stone

Women peacebuilders in the Pacific Islands have been a powerful force for peace when conflicts in Bougainville, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji threatened to create instability across the entire region. Intervention by a participatory network of women during these crises helped broker a more peaceful Pacific by emphasizing a nonmilitarized view of security. Yet despite successes women remain marginalized and excluded from formal decision-making institutions, reflecting the patriarchal governance structures inherited from the colonial era.1 The underrepresentation of women in leadership paired with some of the highest levels of violence against women in the world reveal the need for a regional effort to improve equality and safety for Pacific women.

The Pacific Islands have a long and vibrant history of civil society advocacy linking local issues of climate change, poor economic development practices, and gender inequality to regional-level policies surrounding peace and security. Prominent among these civil society groups is FemLINKPACIFIC, a nongovernmental organization based in Fiji with feminist media and advocacy networks spanning several countries in the Pacific Islands region. FemLINKPACIFIC’s network focuses on how gender inequality generates insecurity and negatively impacts economic growth and development. Through media outreach and lobbying efforts at the national, regional, and international levels, FemLINKPACIFIC played a major role in the establishment of a Regional Action Plan (RAP) for Women, Peace and Security (WPS) in 2012 within the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). In this case a strong civil society network partnered with a regional organization to institute a gendered plan for regional peace and security, thus providing a precedent for the institutional mainstreaming of UNSCR 1325.2

This chapter provides a brief history of women’s peacebuilding organizations in the Pacific, followed by an overview of the PIF regional framework for security and its mechanisms for engagement with civil society. The chapter then reviews how UNSCR 1325 became a unifying agenda for women’s networks and how FemLINKPACIFIC and its media network contributed to the development of a Pacific RAP for WPS. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the difficulties in coordinating at the regional level and a review of relevant lessons from the work of FemLINKPACIFIC.

A REGIONAL NETWORK OF WOMEN

The Pacific Islands have a rich history of women peacebuilding activism that stems back to the 1940s era when women led regional development programs for the South Pacific Commission and church congresses.3 In the 1960s, local women’s peacebuilding groups led protests against nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.4 Since the 1980s, women peacebuilders have turned their attention to the internal security problems of their own countries as conflict and unrest within Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Bougainville began to increase.5 This shift from focusing on external security threats to internal threats resulted in advocacy toward a gendered perspective to security. As a region with high rates of sexual violence and low numbers of female parliamentarians,6 it was critical that women’s voices and concerns transcended their local communities into regional and international realms of policymaking.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.