With devastating conflicts raging in so many countries, creating a more peaceful and stable world has to be top of everyone’s New Year resolutions. Yet the voices of half the population of these countries are ignored, as women are excluded from the peace table.
Last year saw more than 40 armed conflicts, the highest number of battle-related deaths since 1989 and the worst humanitarian and refugee crisis since the second world war.
Women bear the brunt of war today; accurate statistics are impossible to obtain but it is estimated that while at the beginning of the 20th century only 5% of fatalities in wartime were civilians, that figure steadily rose, reaching more than90% by the 1990s. Many of the civilians killed or injured in today’s conflicts are women and children; in Afghanistan, the UN has documented (pdf) a steady increase in both the number of civilian casualties and the proportion of those civilians who were women and children. The impact of war on women goes beyond the harm caused by an airstrike or gunfire between combatants. The breakdown of law and order can leave women unprotected from other forms of violence, as in Afghanistan, where it is estimated that 87% of women have experienced domestic violence, and their attackers are rarely punished. In Liberia many girls are pushed into “transactional sex” – the girls I met at the university in Monrovia were routinely asked to exchange sex for grades. The UK’s preventing sexual violence in conflict initiative has shone a light on all these issues, and the fact that in conflict and post-conflict countries, women are disempowered.
These are compelling reasons to make women stakeholders in any peace talks. Yet the last few years have been replete with examples of how they were excluded. In earlier talks on Syria, Syrian women were ignored. From the picture of the Vienna peace process on Syria in October – where 18 men and one woman sat round the table – nothing seems to have changed.
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