In October 2000, the United Nations Security Council adopted a Landmark Resolution on Women, Peace and Security (UNSCR 1325).
- It expressed concern that civilians, particularly women and children, account for the vast majority of those adversely affected by armed conflict, including as refugees and internally displaced persons, and increasingly are targeted by combatants and armed elements.
- It reaffirmed the need to implement fully international humanitarian and human rights law that protects the rights of women and girls during and after conflicts.
- It recognised the urgent need to mainstream a gender perspective into peacekeeping operations.
- And it reaffirmed the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts and in peace-building, stressing the importance of their equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security, and the need to increase their role in decision-making with regard to conflict prevention and resolution.
UNSCR 1325 was intended to mark a turning point for the representation and inclusion of women in politics and peace-building; but more than twenty years later, its implementation has been limited. Women remain marginalised from many decision-making spaces; they continue to face structural inequalities even when included in dialogue; and as a result, their experiences, concerns, hopes and ideas continue to be overlooked. In the meantime, they not only suffer ongoing sexual violence, economic deprivation, displacement and other such impacts of conflict; they also struggle to secure justice and recompense for the wrongs they have endured.
Over the course of our Visualising Peace project, we have tried to pay attention to many different voices and experiences that have been marginalised in approaches to peace and peacebuilding. This is essential in de-centering the voices that have long dominated and ensuring that peacebuilding is more inclusive in future. To this end, we have created a section in our Museum of Peace for ‘diverse voices‘ on peace.
We also collaborated with photographer Hugh Kinsella Cunningham to shine a spotlight on the Women’s Peace Movement in the Democratic Republic of Congo, through an exhibition of his award-winning work. Showcasing the courageous work of women fighting to restore peace in the DRC, his portfolio of images and portraits project is unique in its effort to document the slow work of peace and the determination of women who advocate for human rights, justice and security in their conflict-affected communities.
Visualising Peace student Maddie McCall has been grappling with some of the failures in the implementation of the UN’s Women, Peace, Security resolution. You can read her critique of the ‘just add women and stir’ mentality in ‘For the love of feminism, please put the spoon down’. Other team members have researched women’s artivism for peace, spotlighting Afghan graffiti artist Shamsia Hassani and Andean women in Peruvian art and activism. We also learnt about women’s activism and archiving in Israel and Palestine from guest lecturer Sarai Aharoni.
As Visualising Peace student Madighan Ryan rightly stresses, attention to issues of gender in peacebuilding has focused disproportionately on women and marginalised the experiences and needs of LGBTQ+ people:
Of the over 1500 peace agreements enacted between 1990 and 2015, only six positively reference sexual or gender orientation, according to the University of Edinburgh’s Peace Agreements Database. Three negatively mention sexual orientation (they reinforce prohibitions on same sex marriage or relations), and the rest do not mention sexual or gender orientation at all. The omission of a queer dimension from conversations surrounding peace and peacebuilding is reflected in our Visualising Peace Project. Almost 50 resources are tagged under the ‘Gender’ category in our virtual library, but only four focus on queer narratives in any capacity, despite queerness being arguably central to the very concept of gender – and peace. I draw attention to this not to fault or critique the project, but to demonstrate the universality of the very prominent gap that exists in who we include when we visualise peace and when we engage in peacebuilding processes.
Madighan Ryan, Queer Rights and Peacebuilding
Through a series of new museum entries and interviews with queer rights campaigners, Madighan has been trying to address this gap – not only to amplify queer voices but also because of the new ways in which queer people and experiences can push us to rethink and re-imagine our habits of visualising peace and going about peacebuilding. As she explains in this blog:
Over the course of my two semesters in the Visualising Peace Project, I have come to realize that one of the project’s greatest strengths is the extent to which it makes students aware of when alternative perspectives are lacking. This is because so frequently, students are challenged by their peers, who bring their own identities, interests, and life experiences to the table. It is because the guest lecturers come from diverse, and sometimes opposing backgrounds. It is because we are encouraged to critically question these lecturers and challenge ourselves (and them) to think about how their answers may have differed if they had come from a different background with a different set of experiences. Once we identify what perspectives are lacking, we can question why that is the case, and what peacebuilding could gain from including them. In this way, we are seeking what Shamil Idris, the CEO of peacebuilding organization Search for Common Ground, calls multipartiality. He suggests that the most effective model for peacebuilding is not traditional non-partiality, but the inclusion of as many ideas, perspectives, and identities as possible.
This process that I have learned through the Visualising Peace Project, and the concept of multipartiality as well as intersectionality, is why I am interested in the value a queer dimension could contribute to peacebuilding. My hope is that this blog is able to shed some light on an overlooked identity in terms of how we visualise peace, and whose voices we listen to when we enact peacebuilding. The perspective of queer folks can improve and stretch peacebuilding as we go about it today. The Visualising Peace Project has not, nor could it have ever hope to, populate the museum, library, and website with a perfectly representative selection of entries, because we ourselves are informed by our own identities, backgrounds and interests – and are limited by our time and resources. But as the project draws to a close, we can be proud of the fact that we have pushed the boundaries of what and who we see when we visualise peace, and in this way have set a precedent and an agenda for future researchers and peacebuilders.