The Gender Dimensions of Social Conflict, Armed Violence and Peacebuilding project’s international consortium, with prominent speakers from Indonesia, Nigeria, and Switzerland, will gather during the Geneva Peace Week to share insights and research findings, and to engage the expert audience with storytelling on innovative, gender-sensitive, and highly contextualised resources for peace.

While the importance of the local turn, everyday practices and inclusiveness are now widely established and praised in peacebuilding theorising and programming, there are few contributions exploring in a nuanced and gendered way conflict-affected communities’ initiatives for de-escalating violence. An international team of researchers from Indonesia, Nigeria, and Switzerland present results from their r4d project The Gender dimensions of Social Conflicts, Armed Violence, and Peacebuilding, involving six years of exploration of the interplay between gender, conflict and peacebuilding in different conflict contexts in Indonesia and Nigeria. Addressing the call for presenting innovative and localised gender-sensitive peacebuilding efforts, the speakers discuss three dimensions particularly relevant for localised peacebuilding programming: the contrasted influences of religions and religious organization in gendered peacebuilding, the role of traditional institutions in contributing to non-violent resolution of conflicts (such as the Umuadas in Igbo communities), as well as the gendered identity dynamics of youth involvement in art for peace in Indonesia.

This event is designed in a participatory fashion. Speakers will engage the expert audience with presentations in the format of storytelling, to showcase a variety of nuanced experiences of gendered peacebuilding in context. At the end of the presentation, the audience will be engaged in contributing to stories from their own experiences, allowing for a discussion and comparison of insights from bottom-up experiences from different regions across the globe. Additionally, there will be a designated rapporteur from the panel organising team who will produce a short blog entry to report and reflect on the discussions, to be published on the r4d gender and conflict website, and circulated to social media accounts.

Finally, the research team also partnered extensively in the last three years with two other Social Conflict consortia to explore policy-relevant synthesis themes, challenges and opportunities on conflict and peacebuilding. The result of their partnership, a participatory documentary exploring inequalities and conflict in fragile contexts,  will be premiered on 4 November 2019 in a separate side-event of the Geneva Peace Week 2019 (#GPW2019). A GWP session on participatory filmmaking on SDG16+ following this event will offer a space to reflect, debate and share some of our lessons learned.

EVENT SPEAKERS

• Arifah Rahmawati (Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia)
• Christelle Rigual (The Graduate Institute, Geneva)
• Mimidoo Achakpa (Women's Right to Education Programme, WREP, Nigeria)
• Joy Onyesoh (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom International)
• Speaker/Moderator: Wening Udasmoro (Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia)

This event is organised within the 2019 Geneva Peace Week in partnership with Gadjah Mada University (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d programme).

Registration here.