Women Negotiating Peace: Empowering Women, 20 Years After Beijing

18 - 19 March 2015, New York, USA – The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) New York Office carried out the fourth Women Negotiating Peace: Empowering Women, 20 years after Beijing. A two-day workshop was organized in a framework of the UNITAR Negotiations Workshops’ series and aimed to promote participation of women in the sphere of negotiation, peace, and development and to recap the developments since the Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action. The workshop aimed to enhance negotiation skills of the delegates and to provide participants with insights and experiences from other women diplomats. The workshop included informative sessions providing data and research, panel discussions and interactive simulation exercises.

The Opening Panel, composed of H.E. Ms. Alya Ahmed Saif Al-Thani, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Permanent Representative of the Permanent Mission of the State of Qatar to the UN, H.E. Mr. Per Thöresson, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative, Permanent Mission of Sweden to the UN, H.E. Ms. Caitlin Wilson, Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative, Permanent Mission of Australia to the UN, discussed empowerment of women and its implications to the advancement of humanity. The Ambassadors overviewed experiences and achievements from their respective countries in regards to the women in leadership positions.

At Session I on Gender and Negotiation, Ms. Natalie Romeri-Lewis, Woman STATS, discussed the linkages between women participation and peace process, providing statistics, analysing obstacles and summarizing the group work. At Session II on Simulation Exercise, Dr. Theodore Johnson, COEX-SID Dual degree program at Brandeis University, provided simulation exercise of women negotiating peace process advancing humanity based on specific examples.

Sessions III and IV offered interactive panel discussions led by experts and representatives from Civil Society (Ms. Maria Butler, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and Ms. Sally (Salwa) Kader, US Federation for Middle East Peace), UN Women (Ms. Mireille Affaa Mindzie) and the Permanent Mission (Ms. Hind A. Naser Alowais, Permanent Mission of the United Arab Emirates). The panellists discussed the relevant UN resolutions, statistics on women leaders at the diplomatic community, effects and benefits of women participation in peacebuilding, future challenges in creating resilient societies, highlighting the role of NGOs and women.

In the final session, Professor Alexandra Carter and her team from the Columbia Law School spoke on Techniques for Women Negotiating Peace – Contributing to the Advancement of Humanity and facilitated a simulation exercise. Participants drafted a peace agreement integrating transitional justice, sustainable peace and the women empowerment.

The workshop represented the first of the 2015 multilateral negotiations training series called: Levelling the Playing Field. The workshop was sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sweden and the Olof Palme Memorial Fund.

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