OSCE Networking Platform for Women Leaders including Peacebuilders and Mediators

6 December 2021

On 7 December at the initiative of OSCE Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid the OSCE launched the OSCE Networking Platform for Women Leaders including Peacebuilders and Mediators. The informal platform connects women mediators and peacebuilders who are active in the OSCE region for learning, networking and sharing best practices in an organic and flexible manner. The aim is to strengthen their ability to meaningfully engage in and influence peace processes at all levels.

Ahead of the networking platform's launch, we asked three women leaders to answer three questions: 1) Why is it important that there be women mediators and peacebuilders? 2) What gender-specific issues need to be considered in peacebuilding? and 3) Why is it important for women mediators and peacebuilders to connect?

Annika Söder

Annika Söder is the Special Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office for the South Caucasus and Co-Chair of the Geneva International Discussions on the aftermath of the 2008 conflict in Georgia. Her distinguished career in international peacebuilding includes serving as Swedish State Secretary for Foreign Affairs from 2014 to 2019. She is currently President of the Board of Governors of the European Institute of Peace and was a member of a group of eminent persons appointed by the UN Secretary-General to review the UN peacebuilding architecture.

Why is it important that there be women mediators and peacebuilders?

There is a strength and sustainability that comes to peace agreements when they are carefully crafted with women included in the crafting. For example, in the peace negotiations in Colombia, where massive consultations took place – and where Sweden supported mediators on gender issues – the peace agreement is holding, even if it is still a very bumpy road. Women’s perspectives are different and this also means that proposals and ideas that come from women are often different. If there were no women peacebuilders, 50 percent of the population’s views would be excluded.

Not only is it important that women be included in peace processes, they need to be able to act on their own terms. It is important that donors who provide resources to women peacebuilders not impose requirements that risk distorting their work.

What gender-specific issues need to be considered in peacebuilding?

In the Geneva International Discussions (GID) I have managed together with the two other Co-Chairs to make the fact that women experience the conflict differently from men a regular topic. I hope this will continue every time we meet in Geneva four times a year.

We conducted a survey which showed that women experience the fact that the border guards on the administrative boundary line between Georgia and South Ossetia are almost exclusively men as an additional insecurity. Also, not being able to move between the outbreak regions and Georgia can have an effect on women’s special health needs, for example with regard to pregnancies. Women in the conflict areas are often breadwinners; therefore, economic issues, for instance in relation to farming, are of special importance to them.

Social and economic issues, important to both women and men, are often forgotten in mediation, which tends to focus on hard security. Paying attention to them can be conducive to conflict transformation and reduction of violence, even if we are still far away from a peace agreement in the Georgia conflict.

Why is it important for women mediators and peacebuilders to connect? What are your hopes for the OSCE Networking Platform?

I was behind the start of the first women’s mediation network ever in Sweden when I was State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and when I stepped down, I had the opportunity to join myself.

The idea behind that network was twofold, and is valid also for the many networks that are now being started around the globe – and of course also for the OSCE.

First, to show leaders that appoint mediators that there are many skillful women that can take on these jobs – because still the majority of mediators in track 1 [official governmental] negotiations around the world are men. And when they say there are no qualified women, they are obviously very, very wrong.

Second, to encourage women who are negotiators, mediators, grassroot peacebuilders and opinion makers to take space, to use the little space they are given but also to widen that space.

I would like to say to my own generation that we should really make space for younger people, their new ideas and experiences of the conflict situation. This is something we are also working on in the South Caucasus – to encourage women’s organizations to support young women in taking on important roles.

Ayşe Betül Çelik

A. Betül Çelik is the founder and leader of the Turkey Antenna of the Mediterranean Women Mediators Network. A full professor at Sabanci University in Istanbul, she teaches and publishes on ethnic conflict, reconciliation, dialogue, forced migration, and gender and peacebuilding. She is a founding member of the university’s Gender and Women’s Studies Centre of Excellence, and Peace Foundation, a civil society organization working for societal peace. She has received “Official” (Ufficiale) rank of the Star of the Order of Italy (Ordine della Stella d’Italia) for her work in gender and mediation. She is also a dialogue facilitator and consultant for civil society organizations.

Why is it important that there be women mediators and peacebuilders?

The question is not so much whether there should be women – obviously yes, there should be, because women make up 50 percent of the population – but also what kind of women. My answer is that it needs to be women who have developed a gender lens to conflict and peace, who have connections to women’s networks and are aware of women’s needs and interests. While there is a need for more women at the higher levels of peace negotiations, they need to be connected to the grassroots level because being in touch with civil society socializes one into the practice of listening, understanding, and reciprocating – for me the three most important norms for being a woman peacebuilder.

When women join peace processes, they have the opportunity to bring women of different conflict strata together under the “women’s identity” umbrella. This can serve as a bridging factor, as an opportunity to discuss issues that divide them and find areas where they can collaborate.

What gender-specific issues need to be considered in peacebuilding?

Conflict and war always affect men and women differently. For example, if we look at forced migration, we can say that women suffer by having to leave their homes and their loved ones. They face discrimination in the places they go to, and if they do not speak the language, they cannot socialize or find jobs.

Violence affects all aspects of life and violence is gendered. Since conflicts and violence are gendered, there must be a gender aspect to peacebuilding. It is essential to incorporate gender analysis into mediation. That means paying attention to the continuum of violence that extends from the (inter)personal to the international, from the home to the battleground. We need to pressure governments to include more women in every aspect of public life and to emphasize the need for everyday peace.

Why is it important for women mediators and peacebuilders to connect? What are your hopes for the OSCE Networking Platform?

Women’s mediator networks can be considered a “community of practice”. They can help women enter specific peace processes, share experiences, and make women’s competence visible and strengthen their role as mediators. They connect the work of women in mediation and peacebuilding with governmental level policymaking and practice.

Another opportunity provided by women’s mediator networks is training for potential women leaders, especially young community leaders. These networks can provide members with expert and financial support to enhance their negotiation skills and their capacity to persuade governments to allocate budget to the implementation of the women, peace and security agenda.

I have participated in many international women networks and what helped me most was learning from others’ experiences and feeling the solidarity. These networks can bring high-level women mediators together with local women mediators. Being an academic and involved with civil society, I am mostly working on track 2 [non-governmental] peacebuilding. I value the chance to hear from people active in track 1 [official governmental] negotiations. At the same time, the knowledge that is produced at the grassroots, that is, on the track 3 [community] level, is vital for designing community level peace interventions. Women’s networks are good opportunities to learn from women in these different tracks.

Oksana Potapova

Oksana Potapova is a Ukrainian women’s rights and peace activist, dialogue facilitator and feminist researcher. In 2014 she co-founded the NGO «Theatre for Dialogue» where she has been working with communities affected by conflict, internally displaced and other marginalized groups of women to build dialogue and cohesion within communities and to advocate the rights of vulnerable groups of women at the national and international level.

Why is it important for women to be engaged in peacebuilding?

Women’s participation can be important for peacebuilding, but we need to approach it a way that takes into account real power imbalances rooted in gender. It is important because peacebuilding is about minimizing violence and women have an understanding of violence that is profoundly different from that of men, that derives from our bodies and our experiences of everyday life. We understand that violence does not stop when a conflict ends and needs to be addressed in multiple and gender-sensitive ways. Women’s participation is also important because peacebuilding is about creating a vision of the future, and that future needs to be inclusive.

However, it is not enough to have women at the negotiating table. We know cases where women have been in decision-making roles and have enforced decisions that were discriminatory, against minority groups for example. We need to have a meaningful dialogue about power, about inclusion and about intersections of vulnerability, with women who represent those different groups.

Do you see your community theatre work as a way to empower women who are affected by conflict?

There is a lot of talk about empowering women, but to me it does not really reflect reality. Women are often the first to respond to crises and there is a lot of power in women’s actions on the ground. In Ukraine we have seen a huge volunteer movement of women organizing humanitarian action and community dialogue in response to conflict. What is lacking is the systems and structures to make those efforts visible. Our work has tried to provide a platform for the knowledge and power that already exists – theatre does exactly that. We have worked not only on the community level but have also used the information generated to provide policy recommendations to the Women, Peace and Security agenda.

What are some issues of gender equality that should be taken account of in peacebuilding?

There is often very little understanding of gender and power dynamics in dialogues and negotiations, but they are there. Being sensitive to the norms of masculinity and femininity that are reproduced in conflicts and in peace processes allows us to work consciously towards more peaceful, non-violent solutions. It may seem basic, but when gender sensitivity finally starts to be a norm in mediation and dialogue processes, that to me will represent a real innovation.

Why is it important for women mediators and peacebuilders to connect? What are your hopes for the OSCE Networking Platform?

My hope first of all is that women come together and experience a sense of support and a sense of multitude. I see this not as a feel-good exercise but rather as a political project, in which we declare that we are many and probably want to be more.

What I am also hoping is that this platform will actually represent experiences and backgrounds of diverse women. There is a need for us as a community to be wary of elitism, to understand and work with differences and intersectionality. If that diversity is there and our coming together is facilitated in a way that invites mutual learning and critical feminist discussion, then this could be a platform where we could bring transformational change to our work and communities.

It is never just about women and never even just about gender. It’s about analysis of power relations and how our understanding of power can affect our projects of building peace.