By WPP Staff
This Friday, the UNSCR 1325 Open Debate will take place once again, seventeen years since the adoption of landmark UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) on Women, Peace and Security (WPS). This resolution did not drop out of the sky – it emerged after many years of dedicated advocacy from women civil society, five years after the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA).
During the mid-nineties, women activists came together in Beijing and presented the world with their powerful feminist perspectives on peace and security. Their concept of security radically challenged patriarchal notions and practice by calling for: disarmament, investments in nonviolent conflict resolution and the prevention of policies of aggression, diverting excessive military expenditures towards social development, and the promotion of women’s leadership in order to advance a culture of peace. As many of these women activists saw it, keeping people safe and secure was not about either-or strategies, brought about by the gains of one powerful party at the expense of another. Instead of investing in an ever-escalating arms race and further militarization of society, they urged those in power to prioritize addressing the root causes of violent conflict, by allocating substantial state budget towards prevention and social and economic development.
Seventeen years after the adoption of 1325 and multiple follow-up resolutions, expert conferences and studies later, when we sit down as women peace activists to ask ourselves “are we there yet?”, the answer is pretty alarming. Instead of seeing the vision of human security come to life that so many of the founding mothers of 1325 had in mind, we are witnessing increased state-centric security policies and practices that continue to draw heavily on militarization and “power over”. At this level, the occasional tribute might be paid to the role women have to play in making the state’s security machinery more effective. But these expressions hardly ever move beyond paper recognitions, let alone set in motion the substantial actions needed towards implementing a more transformative and holistic peace and security vision.
Since 9/11, we can see the fight against terrorism taking over countries’ security and development policies and budgets. All means seem to have become justified to reach the end, including the passing of policies that undermine civic freedoms and human rights. However, by moving its population further away from a reality of lived security that is able to deliver for all, it is likely states might end up only feeding what they are trying to eliminate.
It is ironic, to say the least, that it is women activists, who have been amongst the first to provide early warning signs about the rise in fundamentalisms and extremisms across the globe over the past years - often experiencing its ugly reality first hand. Many of their warnings went unheard - perhaps because they also pointed out that asserting ideologies at the expense of women’s lives and bodies is not a “privilege” claimed by fundamentalist non-state extremist actors only.
State actors - including those claiming to fight terrorists - regularly score pretty high when it comes to ticking the boxes of misogyny, systemic denial of women’s rights, and claiming authority over women’s bodies. The latter also frequently borrow the rhetoric of “protecting women and girls” to gain the public support needed to justify some of the extreme measures they put in place in the fight against terrorism.
In reality, for many women living in conflict zones, insecurity is only on the rise, as they get caught in the frantic crossfires between extremist forces and the powers trying to bring them down. As the Global Study (2015) pointed out: “Women’s groups are trapped between terrorism and countering terrorism...working in very dangerous context[s] where terrorists [exist] and on the other hand their chances to deliver their voice...[are] shrinking in the name of countering terrorism.”
Many women activists working for peace and justice across the globe are increasingly facing a rapidly shrinking civil society space, which is particularly alarming, considering where 1325 came from – women’s civil society mobilizing power. It is important to note here first that “shrinking civil society space” is currently a popular yet also contested term. This has to do with the fact that resistance and backlash are not new phenomena for many women activists, and also, not every civil society organization is affected by it in the same way.
These days, the term is often used as a metaphor to describe a new generation of restrictions on political struggle, activism, and meaningful participation from both States and non-State actors. These include a variety of measures, including restrictive NGO legislation, defaming civil society, targeting and criminalization of human rights defenders, cyber and other forms of surveillance, increasing militarization and securitization, banking restrictions, legal and regulatory countering terrorism financing rules, international travel bans, as well as the instrumentalization of the political work of women human rights defenders and peace activists.
Earlier this year, our research with Duke Law's International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), “Tightening the Purse Strings: What Counter-Terrorism Financing Costs Gender Equality and Security”, analyzed how measures to counter terrorism financing (CTF) impact women’s civil society organizing. Ninety percent of the women’s organizations surveyed for the research indicated that counter-terrorism measures had an adverse impact on work for peace, women’s rights, and gender equality generally. They reported that their governments regularly used CTF rules to restrict their work and funding, which subsequently had multiple impacts on their partners, programs and the people they are serving.
Another key CTF impact reported concerned the gender effects of financial de-risking, with financial institutions increasingly delaying and stopping financial transfers to women’s organizations, and in some cases even refusing to open bank accounts, or closing down their accounts. In terms of CTF and donors, women’s groups reported experiencing increased administrative burdens and reporting requirements, which threatened their organizational capacity. This reality led to several respondents not applying for much-needed funding (41.67 %), or actually refusing offered grants (16.67%). Respondents also indicated that donors were showing less appetite to support women’s activism directly, but instead prefer to work with larger, well-known international organizations, with greater absorption capacity and compliance resources. As a result of all these effects, women activists reported feeling insecure and less safe – 15% of the respondents had experienced harassment or prosecution under CTF measures, while 60 % expressed concern about this.
When discussing our findings with women activists from the MENA region during a consultation in Beirut this year, these resonated with many, with them sharing:
The recent New York Times article “The Myth of Women’s Empowerment” resonates a lot with what the women activists expressed in Beirut. The article describes how women’s empowerment - a term introduced into the development lexicon in the mid-1980s by feminists from the Global South - has “become a buzzword amongst Western development professionals, but the crucial part about “political mobilization” has been excised.” It highlights how women’s empowerment used to be about the task of “transforming gender subordination” and the breakdown of “other oppressive structures” and collective “political mobilization”. It signals that this has become increasingly replaced by a narrow definition, “expressed through technical programming with little heed to wider struggles for gender equality”. It concludes by making the urgent call for investing in women’s political mobilization, so that women themselves can create sustainable gender equality: “The concept of women’s empowerment needs and immediate and urgent rescue from the clutches of the would-be saviors in the development industry. At the heart of women’s empowerment lies the demand for a more robust global sisterhood.”
In terms of 1325 implementation, we can see similarities in terms of some of the dynamics that are playing out. What once begun as women civil society’s empowered – and political! - vision for peace and security during the mid-nineties, has become a rather technical and state-centered security tool. One, in which women mostly ended up as the target group being talked about; who need protecting, saving, recruiting, and whose capacity needs building in order to be “empowered” peacemakers. A tool, that has become increasingly disconnected from the empowering reality of women’s self-organizing capacity and critical political mobilizing, which is the only sustained way women across the globe have been able to create the radical changes they wished to see.
So, if the international community is serious about women’s crucial role in building sustainable peace and security, it should put “enabling women’s civil society mobilizing power” at the top of its priority list. Not a mobilizing power that is convened from above, condoned by those in power, stripped of its radical transformative power. Not a mobilizing power that becomes stifled by rigid and competition-fuelling donor frameworks. Not a mobilizing power that leaves no room for global civil society sisterhood, when forced into short-term project frameworks that perpetuate disempowering North-South civil society relations.
Are we there yet? No, definitely not. But it is now or never when it comes to reclaiming the powers of collective vision and action, if we want to get there on our own terms. Let the recent victory of ICAN bring a glimmer of hope, as a reminder of what women activists can achieve when they unite across the globe to deliver bold visions for peace.
11 Dec '17 This month WPP staff interviewed Arbia Jebali and Sarah Chamekh from Free Sight Association in Tunisia about the work their organization does, how civil society space has changed over the years, which challenges they are facing now, and how civil society in Tunisia is organizing itself to overcome those challenges.
7 Nov '17 In this article, WPP staff interviewed Doron Joles of XminY Fund, an activist organization that supports social movements, action groups and changemakers fighting for a fair, democratic, sustainable and accepting world. He discusses the unique way they have chosen to hand out funds, and the challenges that go along with funding small activist organizations in the current global climate.
21 Aug '17 This summer, WPP staff interviewed Ben Hayes, a researcher on topics such as security policy, counterterrorism, border control and surveillance, about his current work. Ben Hayes has been one of the first to research and write extensively on how countering terrorism financing (CTF) policies have been affecting the right to freedom of association and financial access for nonprofits, and the role of intergovernmental institutions such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in these phenomena. During our interview, we asked him how this topic first came to his attention. We then discussed current trends in trying to craft solutions for the obstacles faced by nonprofits, as well as his take on what it will take to move forward.
