Where are women in the peace talks?

The word peace is everywhere these days. Art of the deal maker President Donald Trump says he wants a "beautiful beautiful peace" in Gaza – achieved, he suggests, by emptying it of its current 2 million Palestinian residents.

In Ukraine, he insists he “just wants the killing to stop”, and that that will happen if Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will just “sign the deal” to hand over his country’s mineral rights to the United States.

Over in Moscow, Vladimir Putin smiles thinly and agrees he too wants “long term peace” but in the meantime his drones and rockets keep flying, his troops keep fighting.

Up and down the steps of airplanes trot the diplomats tasked with sealing these deals. They smile, they shake hands, they offer us one liners about having “productive discussions.” They’re all, all nearly all, in suits, and they’re all men.

So where are the women’s voices in this deal making? Where is the influence of the people, women and men, who actually live in the conflict zones, who know better than anyone what might be needed to create a peace that will last, and that is fair? That’s the question we discuss on Inside Geneva this week, with a roundtable of four dynamic, creative women.

Ending war is not the same as peace

We met in Swissinfo’s broadcasting’s studio just across the road from Switzerland’s parliament, where Deborah Schibler, Leandra Bias, Mahide Aslan, and Larissa Lee, were taking part in a day long debate on women, peace and security.

Schibler is director of Peace Women across the Globe (PWAG), an international network of women in peacebuilding. While she does not dismiss the current attempts to end the fighting in Ukraine, she warns against quick and easy deals.

“Ending war is necessary to peace without a doubt,” she tells Inside Geneva. “But ending war does not mean peace. So whenever these men use the word peace in order to say ceasefire, stop the guns, this is not peace.”

Bias, of Bern University’s Institute of Political Science, also warns that an “illiberal regime” which suppresses gender identity and equality, as Russia has been doing, should be a red flag for wider conflict, before that conflict even starts. “Democracy, peace and gender equality, they mutually reinforce each other” she explains. “Usually when you have democracy, gender equality flourishes, but the other way around as well.”

If we dig a little deeper into what is happening in a state which is suppressing democracy and gender equality, she adds “we would actually have a much better understanding of the drivers of conflict, and therefore also of prevention and resolution of a conflict.”

Women shut out

And while we don’t see women participating in peace negotiations, that is not, our podcast guests insist, because they don’t want to. Lee, also of PWAG, gave us a classic example. Last year in Geneva, preliminary talks were organised to try to bring Sudan’s brutal civil conflict to an end.

Who was invited? The leaders of the two warring sides. No women. But, Lee explains, “a delegation of 15 Sudanese women just showed up despite this. They just said, well, we were not invited, but we’re going to come anyway.”

In the end, the leader of one of the two warring sides decided he wasn’t interested in coming to Geneva, but the 15 women “really used that opportunity” Lee says, to speak to everyone there, including US and Saudi diplomats, as well as officials from the United Nations and the African Union.

“They really lobbied them to listen to Sudanese women and civil society at large.”

And what about peacekeeping?

As Schibler told us, the absence of war is not actually peace. But it can be a start. If a ceasefire in Ukraine is agreed, peacekeepers may be deployed to make sure it holds, and give some breathing space towards building a sustainable peace.

When we think peacekeepers, most of us immediately imagine a man in a blue helmet, but Aslan, head of women and diversity in the Swiss Armed Forces, tells us why it is crucial women have a role here too.

“The contribution of women, including as peacekeepers, is a game changer” she tells Inside Geneva. “You have an easier access, for example, to the population.”

“It’s trust building, which is somehow easier for women to do. During this phase of rebuilding trust, it is much easier when there are mixed teams or women teams doing this task.”

“Women, women’s perspective, gender perspectives, human security perspectives have to be in every process and every structure of armed forces”, she concludes.

Reject the transactional

The conclusion of this discussion is that sustainable peace cannot be achieved by one side imposing a “deal” on another. Schibler suggests the current talks over Ukraine can barely be described as peace negotiations.

“We have to stop saying, OK, this is peace now. That what they’re doing is they’re building peace. That’s not true. Refuse to hear the word peace when actually what is meant is a transactional win, or even blackmail.”

Bias agrees; these talks show, from the US and Russia, a desire for wealth, power, and territory – not a recipe for peace. “What the US is doing right now, it’s an extractivist assertion of power” she says. “Arguably even a second imperial ambition that we are seeing now in the picture, alongside Russia.”

So is real peace achievable? Yes, but it takes time, patience, hard work, and more talent and tolerance than the current “negotiators” are displaying. It must be both diverse and inclusive, women must be at the table. And if they are not given a seat, as Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to be elected to the US Congress said “bring a folding chair.” Listen to Inside Geneva to hear that discussion in full.

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