A curated collection of videos and stories exploring the role women -and children- are forced to play in the endless male conflicts, most recently in Ukraine.
Photo: A woman hugs a child as refugees, mostly women with children, arrive from Ukraine at the border crossing in Medyka, Poland, March 6, 2022 (AP photo by Visar Kryeziu). (cropped)
27 March 2022 | James Porteous | Clipper Media News
Women across the globe are actively preventing conflict and building peace.
As peacebuilders, decision-makers, changemakers and activists, women around the world have mediated with armed groups, negotiated and helped implement peace agreements, advanced political solutions, advocated for women’s rights and participation, led protest movements, built social cohesion and pushed for peaceful transitions from conflict to peace.
Yet, women are still frequently excluded from formal peace processes and decision-making. Their diverse experiences, knowledge and expertise often go unrecognized.
In 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted its landmark resolution 1325, which recognized for the first time the importance of, and the need to strengthen, women’s full, equal, and meaningful participation in peace and political processes.
Twenty years and ten resolutions later, there has been progress but this promise has not been fully realized. Through this interactive exhibition, we invite you to discover some of the many women bringing and maintaining peace in the Middle East, South America and Africa.
And who better to capture their efforts than women photographers who share their struggles?
The War in Ukraine Will Hurt Women and Children Most
08 March 2022 | Aishwarya Machani | World Politics Review
In an article titled “Putin’s War in Ukraine Will Not Stay in Ukraine,” published on the morning of Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, WPR editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein argued that the ramifications of this conflict would ricochet throughout Europe. Some sort of curtain, he wrote, “seems destined to descend” across the continent.
But in addition to this spatial dimension of the fallout from this war, we should also be thinking about the generational aspects of its effects.
Time and time again, we have seen that conflict exacerbates intergenerational injustice. When war breaks out, children and young people inherit tensions that they did not cause and are left to deal with the consequences for decades—and girls and young women bear the largest burden.
War disproportionately hurts those under the age of 30 in both the short and long term. As some of the most vulnerable people in any society, and as symbols of the future, “children have become frontline targets in armed conflicts,” according to UNICEF. Just last month, the United Nations Security Council identified and condemned six grave violations to which children in zones of conflict are especially susceptible.
The list tragically included abduction, recruitment into armed groups and strikes on schools and hospital.
The effects of war also tend to stay with children and young people for much longer than they do with adults. For those who have grown up in conflict-affected areas, suffering and watching the suffering of others at pivotal stages in their development can lead to lifelong mental illness.
Speaking about these mental health impacts more than 10 years ago, the then-deputy president of International Crisis Group, Donald Steinberg, shared his experience of visiting psychosocial training programs for such children and how, when encouraging children to express their thoughts through painting, counselors frequently found themselves running out of red paint. “It’s as if entire [generations are] enduring post-traumatic stress disorder,” Steinberg concluded.
Being female is only likely to worsen one’s experience of conflict. The U.N. Foundation’s recently launched #EqualEverywhere campaign, which aims to promote gender equality, found that war is more devastating for women for a number of reasons.
For instance, because women “often bear the sole responsibility and risk of getting their families out of harm’s way,” more than half of the world’s 80 million displaced people are women and children. Also, since “sexual violence is often used as a tactic to terrorize civilians,” political violence provides space for gender-based violence to thrive. U.N. findings suggest that as many as 1 in 5 female refugees living in humanitarian settings have experienced sexual violence.
In a world where being young or being female can leave you vulnerable, imagine being both. This is what girls and young women in conflict zones are forced to contend with.
At the onset of a crisis, they are the first in their communities to leave school, and the last to return when it ends, with girls 2.5 times more likely than boys to be out of school in conflict zones. And once they leave school, they frequently find themselves vulnerable to predatory victimization amid the chaos of war, whether traded as child brides into forced marriages or into lives of sexual slavery. In fact, more than half of the 30 countries with the highest rates of child marriage are fragile or affected by conflict. Girls and young women, therefore, face a dreadful, intersectional experience of war.
In a world where being young or being female can leave you vulnerable, imagine being both. This is what girls and young women in conflict zones are forced to contend with.
These are not new findings. The disproportionate effect of conflict on girls and women has long been recognized in the international system. As early as 2000, for example, the U.N. Security Council adopted a landmark resolution calling on all actors to “incorporate gender perspectives in all United Nations peace and security efforts,” and on all parties to conflict to “take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence.”
Little progress has been made since then, however. The fate of girls and young women in areas affected by conflict continues to be bleak.
Truthfully, though, this isn’t surprising, because girls and young women have almost no say in conflict prevention efforts and peace negotiations. According to U.N. Women, in countries affected by or rebuilding from conflict, women’s representation in elected office in 2020 stood at just 19 percent.
And as of this year, only 6.6 percent of U.N.’s uniformed peacekeeping personnel were women.* This is especially worrying given that U.N. peacekeepers have been accused of both turning a blind eye to and actually perpetrating sexual violence against women in areas of conflict. With this tableau, it is hardly shocking that little has been done to tackle the gendered dimension of war.
Correcting the intersectional injustices of conflict for women and those under the age of 30 will require both a top-down and bottom-up approach. On one hand, immediate steps need to be taken to address the serious gender imbalance in formal institutions charged with conflict prevention and peacekeeping.
In 2015, for example, the Security Council actually called for the number of uniformed women in peace operations to be doubled by 2028. But this bold vision was followed by little to no action. Now, in light of what seems like a proliferation of conflict worldwide, such steps must be taken with the utmost urgency.
On the other hand, girls and young women must also be empowered to become peacebuilders at the community level. Since passing the first resolution on Youth, Peace and Security in 2015, the U.N. has made some impressive strides in enabling young people to organize and promote peace at a grassroots level.
The U.N. secretary-general’s Peacebuilding Fund, for example, has established a Gender and Youth Promotion Initiative, which supports and helps scale innovative female- and youth-led peacebuilding initiatives on the ground. But it is vital that a gendered perspective be mainstreamed across all U.N. peacekeeping initiatives, rather than remaining a siloed issue.
Now that the world is slowly emerging from the coronavirus pandemic, we have a chance to reboot action on longer-term priorities, like the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, of which Goal 5 on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment is absolutely vital.
The conflict in Ukraine should not be allowed to derail this reboot and distract us from these goals. To the contrary, it should cause us to redouble our efforts to include them prominently in everything we do, including how we respond to and build back from war.
*Editor’s note: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that 8 percent of U.N. peacekeeping military personnel were women, which was the organization’s target for 2021. As of August 2020, women made up 6.6 percent of all uniformed military, police and justice and corrections personnel in U.N. field missions. WPR regrets the error.
Aishwarya Machani is a U.N. Foundation Next Generation Fellow. She led a consultative process bringing together hundreds of young people from around the world to contribute to the U.N. secretary-general’s “Our Common Agenda” report. She also co-authored “Our Future Agenda,” an accompanying vision and plan for next and future generations. She recently graduated from the University of Cambridge. Her weekly WPR column appears every Tuesday.
Women and the war in Ukraine: On the frontlines and on the run | DW News
08 March 2022 | DW
All across Ukraine, ordinary people have signed up to help the war effort.
Many of them are far from home after fleeing the Russian invasion to cities further west. For lots of women, that meant leaving their loved ones behind to fight.
DW’s Fanny Fascar met a group of women in the city of Description Chernivtsi. In between nights in a bomb shelter, they’re spending their days volunteering to support soldiers on the frontlines.
In Focus: War in Ukraine is a crisis for women and girls
UN Women
Women Are The Face Of Ukraine War
25 March 2022 | MSNBC
Women and girls have been disproportionately impacted by the war in Ukraine. Foreign policy analyst Rula Jebreal and CEO of All In Together Lauren Leader discuss how.
Ukrainian journalist in tears confronts Boris Johnson on more help from the West
01 March 2022
During a press conference while visiting Poland, Boris Johnson was confronted by the Ukrainian activist Daria Kaleniuk on the west’s failure to do more for Ukraine, nearly a week after Russia’s bloody invasion
Women, Peace, Power: Women Photographers as Peacebuilders
26 March 2022 | UN
Inspired by the “In Their Hands: Women Taking Ownership of Peace” photographic exhibition, the “Women, Peace, Power” discussion focusses on the challenges faced by women as photographers and storytellers in conflict and post-conflict settings, their aspirations and roles in advancing peace and gender equality.
It is moderated by Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming and features photographers Maura Ajak (South Sudan), Ley Uwera (DR Congo), Sammy Vasquez (Colombia), Hana’a Haza (Yemen) and Laura Roumanos, co-founder and executive director of Photoville.
The “In Their Hands” exhibition profiles 14 women from the Middle East, South America and Africa who have mediated with armed groups, participated in peace talks, advanced political solutions and advocated for women’s rights together with the women photographers who captured their stories. It is available on the UN Exhibits website.
