Fantastic. Thank you very much, Fiona.
Our next speaker is a nominal Ruggie Anderlini, who is the founder and CEO of the International Civil Society Action Network,
where she spearheads the Women's Alliance for Security Leadership, comprising independent women led organisations active in 40 countries.
She's also director of the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics.
Sonam is a globally recognised advocate in the field of women, peace and security,
with many years of experience as a peace strategist working on conflicts,
crises and violent extremism with a mix of civil society, governments and the U.N.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon.
If you if you're happen to be somewhere away from Europe.
And good evening to those of you who may be even further afield. It's a it's a pleasure to be with you here.
I'm sorry that we're not we're not together in person.
I wanted to share my thoughts with you today with with four key points around where we are with this agenda.
But first of all, to start with my own story and my own story is it is long and complicated.
I was 11 years old when I ended up in England as de facto as a refugee from it, from Iran.
So the idea of what it means to have your own country go into conflict or into some sort of crisis
and rupture and then have to deal with the consequences is something that's very personal to me.
And I I got involved in this field precisely for the reason that I didn't want other countries to experience what I had experienced.
I didn't want other kids and other people to experience what I'd experienced.
But it brought me into the world of conflict prevention.
And in nineteen ninety nine, I was one of the we were a team of people working on a campaign called Women Building Peace.
And I for the first time, I arrived at the U.N. to lobby for what became thirteen twenty five resolution thirteen twenty five.
We had done global consultations with women in war zones, with women peacebuilders in war zones to identify what the themes were and back then.
So this is not going 20, 21 years ago, we were already seeing that the nature of conflict was changing,
that the U.N. system was not geared up to deal with 21st century wars.
When you have civil wars, internal conflicts, the principles of sovereignty, respecting sovereignty of states and non-interference,
get in the way of actually being able to deal with these types of conflicts. We are also seeing the rise of new types of threats.
Already we saw the issue of right wing evangelical extremism coming into before.
We, of course, mean the Taliban was was was still around at the time in Afghanistan.
We now see the resurging.
And at the time we were we were still talking about the threat of HIV AIDS as a health global health crisis, a and a security crisis.
So things were different, but not so different to where we are today.
And the resolution deals with it comes from that space.
It comes from a space of women peace voters in Israel and Palestine and Northern Ireland and South Africa and
Rwanda and Burundi and all the places that that at the time there were various forms of conflict going on,
women, peacebuilders, saying the system that we have in place right now is not sufficient.
It cannot deal with the reality of what it means when a war comes into your home and into your community.
When the frontlines of warfare are not some battlefield further away, but it's actually close to home.
And when literally women's bodies become that battlefield, as we saw with with the with with the sexual violence and deliberate strategic
rape that was going on in the wars that we were witnessing then and now,
at the same time, the Israeli and Palestinians and others were telling us we were at the frontlines of the peacemaking.
I don't know how many people know this, but the idea of a two state solution was first floated publicly and designed by women,
Israeli and Palestinian women working together in South Africa in the 1990s.
The first group to come out publicly across the political spectrum were women.
So they were there. They were always present. But there was no no duck vocabulary, if you want,
for explaining and understanding what it is that women do and how it is that women experience and understand war and what their perspectives are.
So this resolution was was was our way of providing a framework and a vocabulary and a global kind of globally recognised set of set of issues.
And as much as we get frustrated by saying it's failed or it's not being implemented properly and so forth, which is all true,
I think it's also important to recognise what it has done and how much of it we take for granted in the last 20 years.
So here are my forth points that I would like to say on that. Number one, before we had resolution 13.
Twenty five on the talk of women in war and peace, the human face of war was not part and parcel of the international peace and security discourse.
If you think about it from the U.N. Security Council or elsewhere, they didn't.
It was never a discussion of what's happening to women.
And then through women, what's happening to young people, what's happening to men, what's happening to people that have different abilities?
What's happening to minorities?
This idea of bringing the human face of war into international discourse about wars was something that was brought about because of this resolution.
And for those of you who say, oh, well, you know that you know why women. I'll tell you this, that if.
We had started with youth. I don't think we would necessarily have gotten to the gendered dimensions of it.
It's often through the lens of women that we begin to see the hetero heterogeneity of society.
I remember when we first got the resolution, people were saying, why do you just talk about women?
Why not talk about the widows? Because we have so many young widows. And why not talk about elderly?
So it gives you the complexity of society and how people are experiencing it.
The second element of what this resolution and what this agenda has done for us is that
it's also helped us and challenged everybody to think about who are the actors so often.
And still we meet when when we have global discussions.
It's the the actors of war are those who will have guns, those who have the weapons and those who defect to have that kind of military power.
But what we've seen and what I work on very, very specifically is who are the actors who emerge as peace actors?
And so often you see that is when a crisis arises.
It is women who run to the problem to try and solve it, whether it's providing humanitarian relief, whether it's doing the early recovery issues,
whether it's doing mediation with armed actors to get access and to enable the humanitarian relief.
Again, we take it for granted. But women are the first and often the best humanitarian responders.
When we imagine people in refugee camps, when when the vast majority are women and children, it is women looking after children.
So just because we think of them in a passive way does not mean that a mother who's trying to figure out what it means to live under
a plastic tent and has to calculate getting blankets and getting food and not being raped and so forth isn't thinking actively.
So recognising that the courage,
recognising the incredible thinking and rationality that has to go on in the midst of chaos I think is very important.
And recognising that those women who step into the space to become peace actors
really deserve to be acknowledged and have their own space at the peace table.
They are actors without using violence and violence and weapons should not be the only ticket to get you to the peace talks.
This, I think, is the most important message. And if you can go away with this one today, I'd be very happy.
The third question around this, which which was also raised before, is the question of how we understand equality.
I what I see with this agenda is that it's not simply that we're asking to have women included into the status quo just so that they can be there.
And this is a discussion that we often have across the spectrum.
Amongst those who are advocates for women's equality in different spaces, I think it's from an equality basis.
It's fantastic. If women want to be combat soldiers, that's that's an it's equality agenda.
That's fine. But this agenda, the women peace and security agenda was about women stepping into the space of peace and security,
saying we want to prevent wars so that neither our boys nor our girls ever have to experience the horrors of war.
But neither our boys nor our girls ever have to be thinking about being killed or killing, being maimed or or maiming, returning home, traumatised.
It is transformative equality for all of us, not just about women getting into the spaces and behaving like women.
And this is, again, something that happens when they come to the peace table.
When women, peace, peace, peace builders are involved in the negotiations, they bring up all sorts of issues that others don't.
In Northern Ireland, go back in the nineteen nineties,
they raised the issues of police and security sector reform, education reform, prison, prison reform.
These were not issues that were necessarily being discussed there. So there's an understanding of the totality and transforming it for everybody.
The fourth point I want to say is about the definition of security.
Again, we heard that this was about human security and if anything, this moment that we're living in brings this back to us in such a critical way.
I live right now and I'm stuck in Washington, D.C., where we are living in the moment of the greatest national insecurity in this country.
Over 30 million people are unemployed. Over 80000 people have died of of Corona of the Corona virus.
And it's completely chaotic. What's happening.
And yet when you think about when you think about where or how we define security and you think about the Pentagon and the Defence Department,
whose existence is basically to provide national security, they are completely irrelevant to what is happening now.
And the dichotomy or the contradiction between seeing warehouses full of weapons that we have,
all the things that we have ready to go to war and kill. And yet we don't have the masks.
We don't have the PPE covers for people, so.
So the question of security and how we define it is something that women brought to the table very, very strong 20 years ago.
And we bring it to them today with us today and in the discussions here.
And again, the idea that we see who were the first responders in our hospitals across the world,
women are 80 percent of the health care workers, both in the medical centres, but also at home.
Nobody talks about who is doing the caretaking at home at this moment when we have the ill and the second silver.
And on the ground in war zones where I have my colleagues and my partners long before anybody else was talking about it,
it was women peacebuilders who have been the first responders in organising the awareness raising around and
around the disease from the awareness raising going down the path of producing hand sanitisers to give it up,
raising alarms around the fact that when we when the World World Health Organisation is telling us people should wash their hands with soap and water,
that there is neither soap nor water in most in many of the places that we're talking about.
Then they came along and they said there's no food, so no women, peace builders are providing food packages.
And along with the food packages, they're saying, well, we must provide sanitary pads for women.
And then as they're developed, providing the food, they're also dealing with the high levels of violence against women and children.
That's happening in the home. And they're bringing in Basra and elsewhere in Iraq and across the world where where we have parties,
it's women peacebuilders who are actually negotiated and engaging the police and religious
leaders and tribe and elders to come in and deal with men who are being violent at home.
So peacebuilders, women, peace voters are the first responders. They take a humanistic, integrated approach to everything.
And they are at the frontlines of this agenda and have been at the frontlines of this agenda.
And yet they're constantly either erased from the picture or taken for granted.
It's not all women who do this. It's a very specific group that emerge and end up taking such action.
And I think it's time that we actually recognise them. I'm going to end with a with a short film and a and an appeal.
Maybe if you're interested in these issues. We have a campaign called She Builds Peace hashtag she build peace.
There's a there's a Web site. She goes she builds peace dot org.
And we are looking at for a four pillared approach which we call soor ss for security.
Peacebuilders need physical security. They're being attacked because of their peace building work.
Always is for obligations. It is. We have ten Security Council resolutions, most of which have not been implemented.
And it's really time that they're implemented and it involves everybody.
It involves the development community. It involves a peacekeeping community and more political community.
Everybody has a role to play in enabling the gender responsiveness in their work and the inclusion of women in one piece.
Is appreciation literally recognising that there are peacebuilders out there and
they do extremely difficult work and it takes a lot of courage and compassion.
And finally, it's about resources,
making sure that we get resources down to the ground into the hands of of the people who are doing such extraordinary work.
And in that context, I think about it in terms of the division of power and responsibility.
We are living in the era where the least powerful are taking on the greatest burdens or responsibility
for caring for those in their communities who are most affected and the most powerful,
which is which is our governments, our states, the Security Council, they are simply absent.
They are not there when they are most needed. And so we we need to be aware of this.
We need to raise our voices and we need to appreciate those who are really at the forefront of this.
So with that, I'm going to try and share my screen and and one one second.
You see how this works. Can you see the screen?
Can you see the screen? They or not, Alterio.
Now you can't sit. You just see.
Yes, you can see the screen. You've heard my two.
Sorry, but this. You heard my story every day.
Although you may not realise it. You've heard how violence is burning like wildfire through everything and everyone I care about.
And you've seen the rubble. That was my life on the news. They told you about the extremists who seem to be more powerful every day.
And the officials in our who hide behind their bombs and bombast take no responsibility to stop the pain.
I know it's hard to imagine yourself in my shoes, the orange shoes I ever imagined being in.
When my children go to bed. I'm like afraid of monsters, the ones they see with their wake.
I see nothing to the imagination. You heard my story before, but only half.
What they didn't tell you is that one day some of us women stood up.
We pick up the pieces of the rubble. We held them and Greece for what we had lost.
Then we used those pieces to build a bridge to the future we want. They want you to believe that peace is impossible.
But my experience tells a different story. And that's the heart of my story.
They didn't tell you I am a peace bender. Is it dangerous, difficult and lonely work?
Yes, but you see, violence is a choice and we reject it.
Our choice is to provide Penns and purpose, to negotiate and find the humanity in others.
Even those who have lost theirs. We choose to deal with conflict, choosing words, not weapons, as peacebuilders.
We know that if we want to solve any of the other problems our work faces, we must first have peace.
Today, more than ever, we need women, peacebuilders, vendors.
We're there to care to seek the disappeared, to challenge those with guns, to talk instructions.
That's why I can invite you to stand with us. She will.
Speace is a global collaborative effort to ensure that women, peace builders around the world can truly soar.
Part of my story, part of our story, if I can make a difference, you can to.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Best live announcement, neighbour relief programme.
Gosh, I'm going to stop there. Thank you very much indeed, Honour.
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