This International Women’s Day is being celebrated under the theme of DigitALL: innovation and technology for gender equality.
In peacebuilding, women’s participation is often recognised as vital for building inclusive, sustainable peace, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) stresses the importance of women’s involvement in peace and security.
How can we champion and facilitate women’s participation through the use of technology?
International Women’s Day 2023: Digital tools for inclusive peace
Our PeaceFem mobile app is one example of an innovative digital tool designed to support inclusive peace. Developed with our partners UN Women, InclusivePeace, and the Gender, Peace and Security Centre at Monash University, PeaceFem provides insights and strategies to support women’s inclusion in peace processes, alongside examples of gender provisions in peace agreements and their implementation. The app is available in Arabic, English, French, and Indonesian, and is being used by women’s rights advocates, mediation and negotiation teams, and other peace and security actors in 60 countries around the globe.
PeaceRep Research into Women and Gender
The PeaceFem app is informed by our wider research, data, and digital tools on women’s inclusion in peace processes. Our PA-X Women, Girls, and Gender database lists all peace agreements between 1990 and 2022 which have provisions on women, girls, gender or sexual violence, and provides full searchable content.
PA-X Gender underpins our research into when and how women and sexual and gender minorities navigate inclusion across all stages of a peace process. We examine how forms of violence change through conflict and what strategies women and gender equality advocates can use to intervene and influence peace settlements. PeaceRep has partnered with the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University, Conciliation Resources and UN Women in this research. We summarise our insights from this work in our key findings on Women and Gender.
With our partners International IDEA and the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law, we founded the Global Network of Women Constitution Makers to elevate the role of women in constitution making. Our most recent annual dialogue addressed constitutional approaches to decentralisation.
In recent blogs, PeaceRep researchers explore how gender perspectives in peace agreements are evolving, how women face challenges to using tech tools for peacebuilding, and how including gendered perspectives on enforced disappearances would be a step forward toward women’s empowerment and gender justice in post-conflict societies. In this report, we highlight the impact of Covid-19 on women’s inclusion in the peace process in Yemen. And here, we examine how to increase the representation of women peace mediators. For even more publications and outputs from our women and gender research, browse our publications database.
We are proud to be working with our partners to build digital tools and resources to support women’s involvement in peace processes. On this International Women’s Day we celebrate the contribution of women’s rights advocates working for inclusive, sustainable peace around the world.