At the end of the year that marked the 25th anniversary of the UN Security Council Resolution on Women and Peace and Security (WPS), the ERC-project ResilienceBuilding organized the three-day conference Gender, Peace and Security: Resistance and Resilience. The conference, hosted by the British Institute in Eastern Africa, brought together 38 scholars and practitioners from across Africa, as well as Europe and the US.
25 years after the birth of the WPS agenda, the term ‘gender’ is literally scrubbed across international agreements and development funding. Instead of substantial increases in women’s participation in peacemaking and peacebuilding, growing contestation over policies around gender and women’s empowerment dominate political debates.
At the conference, scholars from Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon, Kenya and South Sudan, the DRC, South Africa, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and the UK presented new research findings on women’s peacebuilding agency, political resistance, and resilience in settings of conflict and humanitarian crises. Researchers pursued fresh thinking around women’s agency and power structures and presented carefully grounded empirical analysis, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The conference provided space and a constructive environment for a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches focused on gender, peace and security.
The academic program concluded with a public Research-Policy Dialogue Forum, providing space for scholars and practitioners to reflect on women’s participation in local peace processes at a time when national peace processes have lost traction and international support.
The conference and dialogue forum were organized by Jana Krause, University of Oslo, in collaboration with leading members of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the Rift Valley Institute and Louise Olsson, GPS Centre at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.