Stella Duque, the director of Taller de Vida in Colombia. Photo: MADREWhat ends a war is not the piece of paper eventually signed by armed groups. That’s just the part that gets caught on camera. The true path to peace often lies far beyond the negotiating table and is charted by grassroots activists, particularly women, who lay the groundwork in local communities.
As we honour International Women’s Day, 2015 has already provided ample reminders of this. At the start of the year, I found myself engaged in deep dialogue with Syrian women peace activists at a conference in Istanbul. Not long afterwards, I was getting updates from our partners in Colombia, grassroots organizers who have sustained their communities through decades of war. Women in these two places are separated by distance, language and much more, but they are united by the peace that they are molding into reality, every day and too often beyond the recognition of official negotiations.
Nearly 15 years after the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, and 20 years after world leaders negotiated the Beijing Platform for Action, we shouldn’t have to remind the gatekeepers of official negotiations that you cannot reach a peace agreement without women’s voices. If you do, you have significantly increased the chances that the peace agreement will soon fail, as more than half do.
