Moving Beyond Silence: Women Waging Peace
Around the globe, women play a vital but often unrecognized role in averting violence and resolving conflict. With expertise in grassroots activism, political leadership, investigative journalism, human rights law, military reform, formal and information negotiations, transitional justice, and post-conflict reconstruction, these women bring new approaches to the security sphere process. Sustainable peace, and therefore international security, depends on such innovations. But scholarship regarding the work of women peace builders is scarce and women’s work in the field of security is largely unrecognized at the institutional and public policy levels. This chapter of Listening to the Silences: Women and War lays out the case for women’s inclusion in peace building, examples of women’s peace efforts around the world, as well as challenges and successes in connecting such women to policymakers to create a new model of ‘inclusive security.’
