Contact: Aili Tripp, (608) 263-1873, atripp@wisc.edu
When a war ends in Africa and leaders finally gather at the peace table, half of humanity is typically missing: women. It’s bad enough that girls and women are often targeted when armed marauders, militias and government-sanctioned predators run amok. It’s worse, say a growing group of women who identify themselves as peacemakers, that women are often ignored when peace is made.
Too often, continuing violence can hamper or destroy efforts to rebuild society.
Now, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is hosting a project designed to explore women’s existing roles in African peacemaking and to see what lessons can be gleaned from their mostly informal initiatives. In September, members of the steering committee for the Women and Peacebuilding in Africa project described their perspective on the reality behind the headlines about the many conflicts that have beset Africa in recent decades.
Women are often at the front line of attack, said Ayesha Imam, a Nigerian researcher, women’s rights activist and consultant living in Senegal. “In Algeria, where conflict with extremists started in 1991, for 10 years or more, women were very much the targets of extremist attack. We’ve seen this again in Nigeria, where Boko Haram kidnaps schoolgirls, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where girls’ education gets targeted.”
But women are also at the forefront of local and national initiatives to bring about peace and confront extremism. This is the central concern of the research project.
Women may envision peace more broadly than men, Imam says. “We are increasingly defining peace not as the mere absence of physical conflict, but as conditions that enable us to live decent lives, allow children to go to school, and, during peacetime, not to be beaten in domestic violence.”
Funded by a collaborative research grant of $961,600 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the women and peacebuilding project is being administered by UW-Madison’s Center for Research on Gender and Women, under the direction of Aili Tripp, a professor of political science and gender and women’s studies.
In July, the two-year project began to look at the cost of women’s exclusion and the possibilities for their inclusion in peace talks, peace building, and political institutions in countries affected by war in Africa, including regions with predominantly Muslim populations.
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