Human Rights Education Associates

Women, Peace and Security

29 January-10 March 2020 (E05820) | Closed
Instructor: Stephanie Chaban

It is now recognised that conflict prevention, recovery and peacebuilding cannot succeed if half the population is excluded. Conflict prevention, peace agreements, post-conflict reconstruction, and governance is more effective when women are involved and when their needs and priorities are taken into account. Documents such as the UN Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security (1325, 1820, 1888, 1889 and 1960) outline concrete actions to be taken by the international community and respective Member States to address women, peace and security issues. These include actions to increase women’s participation at all levels of conflict prevention, peacebuilding, and peacekeeping initiatives; the protection of women and girls during armed conflict; and the prevention of gender-based violence.

While normative global, regional and national frameworks have increasingly been developed over the last decade, the comprehensive implementation of the resolutions remains the greatest challenge. Conflict prevention, peace negotiations, peacekeeping missions and conflict resolution mechanisms often ignore women’s voices and fail to address the needs of women.

This e-learning course provides participants with an understanding of how a gender lens is critical to all elements of peacebuilding, conflict resolution and recovery work, initiatives and policy. It outlines the normative framework around women’s rights and peacebuilding, security sector governance, approaches to transitional justice, security policy making and awareness raising on women’s and gender issues. This course uses weekly case studies to illustrate how the normative framework has been put into practice in different regions of the world. Finally, the course takes a critical look at the implementation of the women, peace and security resolutions, including gaps that that make a comprehensive, realistic and effective response to gender, peace and security issues challenging in field as well as in the global discourse. Participants will critically analyse international interventions on peace and security from a women’s rights perspective.