PeaceRep recently hosted a workshop at Edinburgh Law School on ‘Women, Peace and Security in the Age of Fragmentation,’ bringing together diplomats, researchers, activists, and policymakers to examine how global fragmentation is reshaping women’s participation in peace processes.
Participants explored the challenges and possibilities for feminist peacebuilding amid today’s crises, with insights to be shared in an upcoming policy report, blog, and podcast later in 2025.
PeaceRep Hosts Scottish Council on Global Affairs Workshop on Women, Peace and Security
On 1 October 2025, PeaceRep hosted a workshop at Edinburgh Law School on ‘Women, Peace and Security (WPS) in the Age of Fragmentation’, supported by a Scottish Council on Global Affairs Insight Grant. The purpose of the workshop was to explore what global fragmentation and the contemporary WPS crisis/es means for women’s rights advocates in peace processes.
The workshop brought together a group of experienced individuals from the worlds of diplomacy, research, activism, and policy to collectively make sense of this current moment in peacemaking, and generate new ideas to respond to a common challenge. This collective work included reflecting on the past and present of peacemaking and WPS, but also thinking about the feminist futures that are possible. The workshop was structured as a series of conversations, with opening remarks from pre-invited participants designed to provoke discussion, followed by an open dialogue between all participants.
Thematic sessions included reflections on:
- Peacemaking and WPS in crisis: What are the greatest challenges facing contemporary peacemaking and the WPS agenda?
- Challenges of inclusion in contemporary peace processes: In what ways do fragmentation in peacemaking and multi-mediation inhibit the inclusion of women’s voices and gendered issues from the peacemaking agendas?
- Navigating inclusion in contemporary peace processes: What can we learn from women who are organising to influence contemporary peace and mediation processes?
Participants drew on their experiences as negotiators, mediation advisers, advocates, academics, civil servants, and feminist activists, reflecting on contexts including Ukraine, Colombia, Yemen, Northern Ireland, Myanmar, Uganda, Sudan, and Iraq.
Reflecting on the workshop, Laura Wise, PeaceRep Senior Research Fellow and Principal Investigator of the SCGA project commented:
“Fragmentation raises huge concerns for women’s rights advocates in peace processes, but we know little about what this means in practice, and how women are navigating complex multi-mediation initiatives to influence peacemaking. At a time when the WPS is facing existential threats from global de-funding and anti-gender movements, this workshop was a timely opportunity to share ideas not only on difficulties, but also feminist imagining of alternative futures in which sustainable peace is at the heart of mediation. I am grateful to the Scottish Council on Global Affairs for supporting this work.”
The workshop discussions and key findings will be disseminated in late 2025 as a policy report (under the Chatham House rule), blogpost, and podcast episode, co-authored with Salma Yusuf, Kasia Houghton, and Fiona Campbell.
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