Heeding Women's Voices:Breaking Cycles of Conflict and Deepening the Concept of Peacebuilding

Abstract

This article highlights the gap between institutional approaches to peacebuilding – which narrowly focus on post-conflict reconstruction of formal state institutions – and the lived experiences of grassroots peacebuilders. It analyses the documented stories of participants in the Women PeaceMakers1 Program at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice at the University of San Diego, demonstrating that peacebuilding does not occur simply after conflict, but at all phases of peace processes. The article and its three case studies – developed with three women peacemakers from the Philippines, Guatemala and South Africa – contend that this expands and deepens the practical and academic definitions of peacebuilding. Without this evolved understanding of the concept, women's actions to build peace will continue to be overlooked and underfunded.

¹The term ‘Women PeaceMakers’ is intended to encompass women's multiple roles in pursuit of sustainable peace and social justice. Thus, in this article ‘peacemaking’ and ‘peacebuilding’ are used interchangeably.

Introduction

In recent years, particularly since the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in the year 2000,2 much lip service has been paid to women's critical role in peacebuilding. Yet the reality is that women continue to be excluded from formal peace processes, and their multi-faceted and profound contributions to peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding are still neglected in official accounts of the transition from war to peace. A decade after Resolution 1325, women are still largely invisible in peace processes, except as victims.3 This is in large measure due to the fact that women's contributions ‘usually are informal, ad hoc and rarely part of formal peace processes, so their stories often drift, unacknowledged’ (Porter 2007: 1). Only by allowing women peacebuilders to tell their own stories can we begin to understand the challenges as well as the opportunities for women's active participation in peacebuilding. This is particularly true since much of the academic and policy literature produced by international scholars and institutions tends to view peacebuilding as a top-down rather than a bottom-up process. Indeed, a quick review of the multiple definitions of peacebuilding by key organisations, including the UN, the European Union and the World Bank, reveals the highly institutionalised and demand-driven approaches that currently shape international understandings of peacebuilding (Cousens et al 2001; Barnett et al 2007). Yet as Lederach (2005) eloquently describes in The Moral Imagination, peacebuilding involves deeply personal and creative acts by ordinary individuals caught in difficult conflict contexts. Their voices are rarely heard beyond their own communities.

Addressing this challenge, this article examines the decade-long Women PeaceMakers (WPM) Program at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice (IPJ), based at the University of San Diego. The WPM Program was explicitly designed to provide women peacemakers from around the world a protected space to examine their life trajectory and reflect on how they came to be agents of peacebuilding in their own communities. The article starts with a brief overview of the current state of women in international peacebuilding efforts. It then provides a short history of the WPM Program and analyses its methodology, which is based on the conviction that there is no substitute for women's experiences told from their perspectives since peacebuilding is personal and context-specific. Drawing upon the life histories recorded in the programme, the article extracts key lessons about peacebuilding in diverse contexts and the implications for international support for peacebuilding. The article ends with condensed case studies of three of the programme's Women PeaceMakers, derived from the rich documentation produced by the unique peace writer-peacemaker partnership of the programme. While this article is written by three women who have been involved in the programme in different capacities, the stories come directly from the Women PeaceMakers' own narratives.4

A Slowly Turning Tide

In awarding the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman, the Norwegian Nobel Committee (2011) recognised ‘their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peacebuilding work’. It also noted that we ‘cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society’. Since 1905 only 15 women have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but they nonetheless represent women's diverse contributions to peace – from human rights and democracy to poverty alleviation and sustainable development.

In recent years there has been increased networking among women peacemakers around the world and a growing body of academic and policy literature aimed at bringing women's voices to the forefront of discussions about violence, conflict, peace, human security and development based on their unique experiences. From the West African Mano River Women's Peace Network to the African Women Committee on Peace and Development, from Femmes Africa Solidarité to the Institute for Inclusive Security's Women Waging Peace Network, numerous organisations now provide women the opportunity to share experiences, gain new skills and amplify their voices nationally, regionally and internationally.

Equally importantly, building on the pioneering work of Meintjes, Pillay and Turshen (2001), Moser and Clark (2001), Manchanda (2001), Hunt (2004) and others, there has been a proliferation of scholarly works analysing the role of women in war and peace. In Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini describes her goal as being to bridge

the divide between the world of women's peacebuilding and that of the international peace and security community, to show how and why women's presence, activities, opinions, approaches, and resilience matter in precisely the areas that they are often ignored. In every area of work, women are not only actively engaged, but information about their experiences and how they are treated is directly relevant to the international community in building sustainable peace (2007: 229).

Similarly, in their 2011 edited volume Women Waging War and Peace, Cheldelin and Eliatamby explore women's agency in war and peace by examining women's stories from diverse countries, including Nepal, Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Sudan, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the territory of Chechnya. In a recent issue of the Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, Pillay, Scully and Speare (2010) have looked more closely at the specific example of Liberia, while in their own work Ni Aolain, Haynes and Cahn (2011) offer a critique of gender mainstreaming policies (and lack thereof) in post-conflict processes. The activist networks and scholarly publications are critical in moving the women's peacebuilding agenda forward. However, they capture only a tiny portion of women's contributions to peace and security and they rarely provide deep insights on how ordinary women become peacebuilders against many odds. There are many women whose stories are never told because they are too busy doing the hard work on the ground and do not have the luxury to reflect on that work.

There are many women whose stories are never told because they are too busy doing the hard work on the ground and do not have the luxury to reflect on that work

The Approach: Keeping Women's Peacebuilding Stories Alive

The Women PeaceMakers Program, the only known one of its kind,5 was established in 2003 at the IPJ, a practice-oriented entity housed at the University of San Diego. From the start, the goal of the programme has been to document in detail the stories and best practices of women leaders who are involved in human rights and peacebuilding efforts in their home countries. Now in its tenth year, the programme was developed on the premise that women on the frontlines of efforts to end violence and secure a just peace generally have little time or few resources to record their experiences, activities and insights. It is also built on the understanding that during and after conflict, ‘women's advances – the survival strategies that kept families alive and communities together – are erased from the historical record’ (Meintjes et al 2001: 17). The programme therefore set out to redress this significant gap in the understanding of peacebuilding.

The programme has a distinct approach which is based on the premise that peacebuilding is both a personal and context-specific endeavour. More often than not, women peacebuilders become involved when they are confronted with threats, risks and challenges, assuming leadership roles and bringing forth unknown or untapped resources. Accordingly, the programme is designed to explore each woman's unique path to becoming an active agent of peace. For women who want to document, share and build upon their peacebuilding experiences, the eight-week residential programme at the IPJ allows them the space and means for reflection and learning. By giving the women the opportunity to analyse the evolution of their engagement in peacebuilding and discern what worked and why, the programme allows for wider lessons for individual peacebuilders and the fields of peacebuilding and development to be extracted and possibly replicated, in appropriate contexts. To date, the programme has documented the work of 35 peacemakers from 29 countries, whose experiences form the basis of this article.

The Women PeaceMakers are selected from a wide pool of international applicants who are prepared to reflect on and reveal their experiences in conflict and their methods for building peace. Each peacemaker is paired with a professional ‘peace writer’ to document her story. Through daily semi-structured interviews and the researching of conflict histories and contexts, the writers produce an in-depth publication that seeks to represent accurately and authentically how and why some women choose to counter the violence around them, and what it means practically to build peace during and after conflict. Part of the writers' job is to help peacemakers explore areas they might not have considered, including their childhood, education and experiences in conflict that are at the root of their peacebuilding engagement.

The final publication produced by the writer-peacemaker team consists of narratives and additional information to provide a deep understanding of the conflict and one person's journey within it.6 The narrative form – the bulk of the final publication – is used instead of straightforward oral histories or interview transcripts, for numerous reasons. Narratives are designed to go ‘beyond headlines to capture the nuance of complex situations and expose the realities of gender-based violence, thus providing an understanding of conflict and an avenue to its transformation’ (Noma 2007: 8–9). As detailed explorations of women's lives before, during and after conflict, the narratives provide context not often found in media sound bites, ‘legal documents used in courts or truth commissions, or in the brief vignettes of brutality documented in many reports produced by human rights organisations’ (Noma 2007: 9). But beyond this, and crucially, they illustrate how and why women are not simply victims, but powerful agents of change in situations of conflict and post-conflict.

Narratives: Exemplifying Women's Roles in Peacebuilding

There are myriad ways to read and analyse the narratives that have been produced in the Women PeaceMakers Program, and in the nearly 10 years of the programme much has been learned that has special import for the fields of peacebuilding and development. Examining material from the narratives of Women PeaceMakers in the light of an accepted model of peacebuilding and engagement in conflict transformation illustrates how the activities of these women expand and deepen the definition of peacebuilding.

An adapted model of Kriesberg's Conflict Cycle (2006)7 was used to show stages of conflict with arrows indicating the internal and external factors that may feed into each stage. Kriesberg's language was modified to exemplify how the pattern can be broken, changing the ‘Consequences’ stage – which falls outside of the cycle and feeds into the next round of conflict – to ‘Sustainable Peace’ (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Adapted model of Kriesberg's Conflict Cycle

Reading the narratives of Women PeaceMakers against the revised Kriesberg model shows that these women are able to act at all stages of the cycle, with the aim of breaking that pattern and setting their communities and nations on paths to sustainable peace. Six main themes emerge from the narratives:8 crossing lines of division; building parallel structures; creating and reclaiming space; listening; speaking; and seeing the big picture. These categories are quite fluid, nowhere near exhaustive, and may not apply to all 35 Women PeaceMakers. There is also no presumption that women have a monopoly on these methods and strategies of peacebuilding; however, since women's peace activities are overlooked and underfunded, it is necessary to pay special attention to their contributions.

While case studies for each individual peacemaker are beyond the scope of the journal, three condensed cases are included at the end of this article, and evidence from these and other cases are elaborated below.

Crossing lines of division

A prominent theme throughout the stories of Women PeaceMakers is their instinct and courage to cross lines of division. This often stems from their preoccupation with the ways in which violence and injustice affect all civilians and unarmed groups – women and men, youth, the elderly and marginalised, and minorities. Because of this sensitivity to the victimisation of all unarmed groups, and because they are often victims themselves, these women seem predisposed to include multiple groups in their varied activities toward building peace. As Cynthia Cockburn notes, ‘If women have a distinctive angle in peace, it is not due to women being nurturing. It seems more to do with knowing oppression when we see it’ (Manchanda 2001: 17), and as Cheldelin and Eliatamby state:

A prominent theme throughout the stories of Women PeaceMakers is their instinct and courage to cross lines of division.

In many cultures, women's socialisation places them in inferior positions to their male counterparts. It is this disadvantaged vantage point that … has also given them the insight and ability to understand violent structures and the root causes of violence and to take actions to change the structures that give birth to and foster violence (2011: 283).9

The narratives of peacemakers repeatedly show them crossing dividing lines and demystifying notions of the ‘other’ in order to include all parties in the resolution of conflict. Peacemaker Susan Tenjoh-Okwen founded the Moghamo Women's Cultural and Development Association in Cameroon, where a bitter chieftaincy dispute has for decades divided the village of Ashong, inhabited by the Moghamo tribe. The association has united women from both factions in development, income-generating and agricultural projects, such as building a well in the village, sewing and selling fabrics and educating one another and their children (Hughart 2007: 7–9; Noma et al 2007: 46).

When Zeinab Blandia was forced to flee from her homeland in the Nuba Mountains to the displaced person camps outside Sudan's capital, Khartoum, she found diverse and often warring ethnic groups from the multiple conflicts all over the country. Recognising that they faced common hardships in the camps and were united in their identity as displaced persons, Blandia appealed to their shared Sudanese value of hospitality and proposed a monthly meal for groups to share culinary specialties unique to their areas and discuss issues that were affecting them. The Tabag Alsalam, or Tray of Peace, fostered respect and understanding of cultures and customs, promoting cooperation in the camps (Freeman 2009).

The Mannar Women's Development Federation (MWDF), established by Sri Lankan Muslim peacemaker Shreen Abdul Saroor and her Tamil friend, united women from both ethnic communities in development and income-generating projects. It was founded less than a decade after Saroor and fellow Muslims were driven from their homes in Mannar by Tamil groups, in the midst of the brutal civil war between the Sinhalese government and Tamil separatist groups. The foundation speaks to her vision of reconciliation and her keen observation that women from both communities could empathise with one another over their displacement and war experiences:

It was clear that both Tamil and Muslim women had been doubly victimised. First, the war made them the heads of their families and forced them to earn income. Second, they were marginalised by the social structure that had restricted their access to resources (Chung 2004: 33).

Saroor saw income generation as a way of finding common ground between the communities. It was not a quick or easy process to build trust, but the MWDF continues to this day as a model of women's empowerment and community unity.

Building parallel structures

Another manifestation of the Women PeaceMakers' attention to the needs of civilians caught in armed conflict, and their own experiences of exclusion, is their tendency to build parallel structures. These structures address those needs that are overwhelmingly neglected by the government, armed parties and international community, or when civilians are shut out of official processes. These structures include the development of an inclusive civil society such as the founding of NGOs for humanitarian aid and assisting displaced populations, or those that involve citizens directly in stopping an armed conflict or halting structural violence. The formation of Bantay Ceasefire in Mindanao in the Philippines is a prominent example.

Mary Ann Arnado and her organisation, the Mindanao Peoples Caucus, created this parallel structure to monitor the ceasefire on the island. She states:

Who better to be a ceasefire monitor than someone who is going to be directly affected by a violation of it? We wanted to participate in the ceasefire committee to help ensure that the ceasefire agreement would be implemented on the ground, right into our own communities (Woodward 2005: 23).

The independent, community-based ceasefire monitoring group now has over 900 volunteers from the three affected communities (Christians, Muslims and indigenous people), covering seven provinces of Mindanao. Moreover, while initially excluded entirely from the formal process, Bantay Ceasefire is now part of the official International Monitoring Team that oversees the ceasefire.

In Kyrgyzstan, where ethnic conflict broke out sporadically after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Raya Kadyrova worked for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, implementing a tolerance education programme. She felt constrained by the slow bureaucracy and wanted the flexibility to respond to the communities' articulated need to address domestic violence, the exclusion of women from public life, pervasive corruption and latent ethnic conflict. In 1998, Kadyrova formed the Foundation for Tolerance International, which is now well regarded for its success in uniting ethnic communities, mediating disputes and empowering disenfranchised groups (Barker 2003).

Creating and reclaiming space

Giles and Hyndman write that:

As groups struggle to shape the meanings of spaces and create places, they reconstitute and transform social relations. Conflicts are maintained at multiple spatial scales – local, national, and international; to acknowledge ‘place’ is to enable women and men to move past their experiences of conflict and transform these places (2004: 6–7).

As seen in the narratives of the Women PeaceMakers, they often create, reclaim and utilise new social spaces to change the dynamics of that space for the better. For example, after the end of the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Svetlana Kijevcanin and a group of creative artists produced ‘Imagine Belgrade’, a project whose explicit goal was to make ‘Belgrade an accessible village’ rather than the isolated, despondent, intolerant city it had seemingly become in the war years under Slobodan Milosevic. They took over a main bus line in the city, plastering it with posters and stickers advocating the resurgence of simple acts of human kindness, and naming it the ‘Bus of Good Manners’. They also reclaimed part of Knez Mihajlova, the main street in Belgrade, and designated it the ‘Courtesy Zone’, with traffic signs indicating that people should revive simple courtesies like ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘excuse me’. ‘Imagine Belgrade’ was in some ways a small gesture, but it coincided with the rise of the non-violent movement Otpor, and was one more proof that citizens had had enough of Milosevic, who was forced from office later that year (Noma 2006).

As seen in the narratives of the Women PeaceMakers, they often create, reclaim and utilise new social spaces to change the dynamics of that space for the better

In a different context, another Woman PeaceMaker created new spaces, this time for women. Palwasha Kakar, a member of the Ministry of Women's Affairs in Afghanistan, has helped create safe spaces for women in the radically conservative climate of her country. One is a women's garden in Kabul, a private outdoor area where women can be free to take off their head covering or full burqa. Another is a women's shelter in Jalalabad for women without male ‘protectors’ to give them access to society (women cannot go to the market, for instance, without their husbands or sons). In a conflict that has claimed the lives of so many men, and women are often separated from their families because of the violence, the space in Jalalabad provides safety and support for these women (Noma et al 2007: 42).

Following the invasion of Iraq in the second Gulf War, the United States military had taken over neighbourhoods and schools, using them as makeshift bases while conducting their operations. In a forthcoming narrative from the Women PeaceMakers Program, Nikki Lyn-Pugh describes how Rashad Zaydan and a group of women confronted the brash, young armed soldiers who were occupying their children's school. Despite their mockery, the women convinced them they needed to vacate and clean the classrooms before their children could return to school. It was a literal reclamation of space, but signified much more to the women while they were living under occupation.

Listening

Zandile Nhlengetwa of South Africa, when asked what she understood by peacebuilding, was wary of defining it, believing that practitioners must listen and let the group they are working with express it. She states:

I would say peacebuilding is defined differently by each community. In my experience youth wanted income-generation projects and they wanted to go to school. For them, initiating those projects was peacebuilding. The women were interested in getting more involved in being better parents because they never had good role models during the apartheid system. For them, that was a process of peacebuilding in their own personal lives and personal development. For women, peacebuilding was also having literacy classes where they can learn to read and write and have skills to sew – it was about empowerment and acquiring skills … So I think it is important when you deal with this issue to listen to how people define it, not the way we would define it (Simoni 2008: 49).

These notions of listening, consultation, dialogue and reflection are nearly universal among Women PeaceMakers in both the intent of and methods of their work. Blandia from the Nuba Mountains in Sudan undertook a year-long process (built on her own 20 years of study) of community engagement and listening before she and her organisation, Ruya, formed Women's Solidarity Fund Groups – ensuring that the community had the capacity, could take the lead and make them sustainable (Freeman 2009). Listening is fundamental for Salvadoran peacemaker Marta Benavides, who practices mindfulness and discernment in all of her peacebuilding work (Fenly 2009). The same is true of Milet Mendoza of the Philippines, who remarks, ‘If you are humble, you are able to listen. You believe a poor person is not too poor to give something and a rich person is not too rich to ask for something’ (Liepold 2010: 52). Though not always explicitly stated, this quality of listening abounds in the Women PeaceMakers' narratives.

These notions of listening, consultation, dialogue and reflection are nearly universal among Women PeaceMakers in both the intent of and methods of their work

Speaking

Women PeaceMakers often phrase their motivation to engage as an obligation to act. In response to their consultations with communities, they feel the need to speak out against injustices. While their social identity as women can often present obstacles to their voices being respected in halls of power, they find other ways – such as their identities as mothers or the perception that they are less threatening – to speak out. With Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee, Vaiba Flomo organised Christian and Muslim women to protest the civil war in Liberia. Uniting as wives and mothers intent on ending the killing and maiming of their children and husbands, the women demonstrated daily in a field between President Charles Taylor's home and the presidential palace, so that every day he would be confronted with their demands that he negotiate for peace. When the negotiations later stalled, Flomo and the women held a sit-in at the venue of the talks, demanding that the men stay until a peace agreement was secured (Koenders 2010).

The imprisonment of political dissidents and abduction of civilians without trial have been used on nearly every continent as a form of intimidation and political control before and during violent conflict. Women seem to bear the burden of seeking their lost ones, as it is primarily male children and husbands who are taken. However, peacemakers have recognised that their status as women at times allows them a degree of political access by which to find them. When her husband was arrested in the Nuba Mountains and his fate was unknown, Zeinab Blandia mobilised the mothers and wives of fellow prisoners to present a petition to the governor, effectively shaming him into action:

Thank you, Governor, for taking the time to meet with us … Imagine how you would feel if you came home tonight to hear a member of your family had been arrested? What if it was your son who had been taken? If I was your mother, can you imagine my pain if your father suddenly disappeared? Wouldn't you try to look everywhere to see if you could find him? (Freeman 2009: 45).

In the centre of Nairobi, Freedom Corner was named for the two-year protest and hunger strike mounted by Wahu Kaara, Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai and a band of mothers to free Kenya's political prisoners during Daniel arap Moi's rule. When police moved in and nearly assaulted an elderly unarmed grandmother, political opinion swelled in support of the protest, making it more difficult for the government to quell. While they were eventually forced to relocate to a church, the women ended their strike only after two years, when they had secured the release of all 52 prisoners (Morse 2011).

Seeing the big picture

The overarching theme that emerges from the narratives of Women PeaceMakers is that these women have a clear vision of sustainable peace, and thus their strategies and methods for achieving it tend to be holistic, addressing the phases of conflict along Kriesberg's cycle. Nhlengetwa, a community development worker in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, defines peace as a situation in which

conflict is there, but there are systems of peacebuilding that are initiated at different levels. If there are systems in place we might have conflict, but life will go on because there are systems that are containing the tensions. We are not saying conflict is going to end. But we would make the communities safe enough that they could differ in ideas and ideologies and still live in the community (Simoni 2008: 49).

Milet Mendoza, a humanitarian worker in conflict-affected communities in the Philippines, offers another expansive definition of peacebuilding: ‘Whether it's daycare, water, sanitation – it's peacebuilding, and every peacebuilding act is also an act of healing’ (Liepold 2010: 51).

Rubina Feroze Bhatti of Pakistan has likened her and her organisation's peacebuilding practices to a cycle. Barker explains it this way:

The strategies and activities … tend to wrap themselves into a cyclical pattern, as the result of one strategy and activity is often the creation of an activity that falls under another strategy. Certain strategies and activities build the foundation for others [in a] … holistic approach … [B]uilding peace requires creativity and multiple foci and approaches … (2009: 113).

Sister Pauline Acayo helps to reintegrate former child soldiers in the midst of the continued conflict against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in central and east Africa, because ignoring their needs means the cycle of violence will continue, even if a peace agreement is eventually signed or Joseph Kony, the LRA leader, is arrested or killed (Noma 2005).

Kijevcanin of Serbia builds the capacity of youth from all ethnicities to resolve conflict non-violently (Noma 2006) because it is the young who must move beyond hatred and polarising enmity to establish a stable Balkan region. These are strategies that have far-reaching consequences for the likelihood of attaining a true peace.

Deepening the Concept of Peacebuilding

As the documentation of Women PeaceMakers clearly displays, women are doing varied and profound work for their communities and nations before, during and after periods of violent conflict. This work affirms the findings of Meintjes, Pillay and Turshen (2001) as well as Porter's simple assertion: ‘[C]onventional peacebuilding methods do not capture the full range of areas across which women work toward regenerating their communities’ (2007: 29). The theoretical and academic definitions of peacebuilding generally echo the work of the Women PeaceMakers. For example, Lederach defines peacebuilding

as a comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates, and sustains the full array of processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships … The term … involves a wide range of activities and functions that both precede and follow formal peace accords. Metaphorically, peace is seen not merely as a stage in time or a condition. It is a dynamic social construct (1997: 20).

Similarly, Porter notes that peacebuilding

involves all processes that build positive relationships, heal wounds, reconcile antagonistic differences, restore esteem, respect rights, meet basic needs, enhance equality, instil feelings of security, empower moral agency and are democratic, inclusive and just (2007: 34).

Yet this broad conception of peacebuilding is often at odds with the narrower understandings supported by international actors and policymakers. Peacebuilding entered the policy lexicon with former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1992 landmark report, An Agenda for Peace. Boutros-Ghali saw the transition from conflict to peace as a linear process involving preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding. Peacemaking involves the act of getting parties to end the conflict through a ceasefire or peace agreement, followed by peacekeeping whereby a ceasefire is maintained and enforced by a third force that keeps the armed parties from hostile engagement. Post-conflict peacebuilding is the last phase of this sequential process. For many within the international system, peacemaking and peacekeeping are viewed as short-term activities that must occur before the longer-term business of peacebuilding can commence. But as Mazurana and McKay explain, ‘Few women doing grassroots peacebuilding work classify it according to Boutros-Ghali's definition – that almost exclusively emphasises post-conflict reconstruction of state institutions’ (1999: 11). Porter states similarly that ‘restricting peacebuilding to “post-conflict” misses the practical, informal work that women (and men) do to build peace in grassroots groups, communities, villages, tribal groups, clans and families’ (2007: 30).

Although there has been a steady expansion of the definition of peacebuilding since An Agenda for Peace,10 the reality is that international institutions are greatly constrained by their mandates in their support for peacebuilding. A big gap remains therefore between institutional approaches to peacebuilding and the lived experiences of peacebuilders working in contexts of protracted and often recurring cycles of violence and conflict. For example, the UN's Peacebuilding Commission, Peacebuilding Support Office and Peacebuilding Fund focus on post-conflict recovery, reconstruction and institution building, although they acknowledge that peacebuilding can happen even before conflict ends (UN 2010b). Similarly, the UN Secretary-General's 2010 report on ‘Women's Participation in Peacebuilding’ focused exclusively on women's roles in post-conflict contexts, and its seven-point action plan is strictly limited to post-conflict needs.

Meanwhile, it is encouraging that the newly created UN Women takes a more expansive view of women's roles in conflict, peace and security. On the peacebuilding page of its website, UN Women includes activities as diverse as ‘traditional peacekeeping operations’, ‘peace negotiations, which shape decisions on post-conflict recovery and governance’ and ‘the development of gender-sensitive early warning strategies to prevent the outbreak of conflict’.

Practical Implications

The work of Women PeaceMakers expands and deepens the concept of peacebuilding in practice and policy, and this has important implications. As Porter concludes, the proper definition of the term – that it occurs at all phases of conflict and peace processes – ‘has practical relevance for who does what, who is recognised for doing what, and who is supported for doing what in transitional societies’ (2007: 23). Indeed, as the above review of the Women PeaceMakers' experiences has demonstrated, irrespective of the stage of a conflict, women cross lines of division, create and reclaim non-violent spaces, build parallel structures when excluded from official ones, listen to and consult affected communities, and speak truth to power based on their identities – and others' cultural perceptions of them – as women. This is all peacebuilding. Guatemalan peacemaker Luz Méndez envisions it as:

Children attending school, no illiteracy. Children wearing shoes, not barefooted. Families living in dignified houses. Hospitals providing health care to the population. No children dying from malnutrition. No women dying in childbirth. Women living in their houses and walking on the streets without the threat of sexual violence. Women elected equally to powerful positions. Flourishing of arts and culture. This is my hope (Cross 2004: 45).

It is only through such an expanded and generous definition – a holistic approach to conflict transformation – that sustainable peace can come about. It will take myriad strategies and methods, and flexible funding and resources from international organisations that intentionally consult and listen to the voices of grassroots peacebuilders, to reach this goal.

Yet because peacebuilding is context-specific, it is essential that external support for peacebuilding is effectively grounded in local realities. The three case studies presented below provide further insight into the reasons each of these women chose their particular engagement at a certain stage in the conflict, the results of the intervention and the lessons learned.11

Mary Ann Arnado of the Philippines: Civilians De-escalating Armed Conflict

‘Who better to be a ceasefire monitor than someone who is going to be directly affected by a violation of it?’ asks Mary Ann Arnado of the Philippines. This simple logic stands in contrast to the majority of ceasefire agreements, in which the third parties monitoring them are typically international armed peacekeepers.

This case study presents the work of Arnado and her organisation, the Mindanao Peoples Caucus (MPC), who defied the soldiers, rebels and politicians who thought civilians had no business monitoring a ceasefire. In late 2002 and early 2003, during a resurgence of violence amid official peace talks, Arnado and the MPC created a community-based ceasefire monitoring group, Bantay Ceasefire (or Ceasefire Watch), which has since become a well-respected network of nearly 1,000 civilians – including an all-women's peacekeeping team – covering seven provinces in Mindanao. Because of the group's impartiality and expertise, in 2009 the MPC was invited to be part of the official International Monitoring Team that monitors the ceasefire between the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Arnado was a Woman PeaceMaker at the IPJ in 2005, when she explained the development of Bantay Ceasefire.

Armed conflict in Mindanao12

The island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines – home to indigenous peoples, Muslims (known as Moros) and Christians – is the site of several armed conflicts dating from the 1960s, but with their roots in Spanish and United States colonialism. After three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, in 1898 the Philippines came under U.S. control after the Spanish-American War. During U.S. colonisation and continuing through independence after World War II, the state-sponsored migration of Christians from the north into Mindanao displaced Moros and indigenous peoples, and led to their increasing marginalisation.

In addition to this marginalisation, the Jabidah Massacre on Corregidor Island in 1968, in which 30 Muslim army recruits were killed by the army, and the formation of a Christian vigilante group known as the Ilaga, or ‘Rats’, were the impetus for the development of armed Moro resistance movements in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) fought to create an independent Muslim state on the island.

Divisions arose in the MNLF after 1976 and a breakaway faction, the MILF, began carrying out attacks against the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). In 1996, the MNLF signed a final peace agreement with the government, but the MILF refused to recognise it. The peace process – and violent clashes between the MILF and the AFP – have continued since the mid-1990s. Mindanao is also the base for other armed groups, including Abu Sayyaf, which uses extreme methods such as kidnapping, extortion, torture and banditry in its quest for an Islamic fundamentalist state.

Bantay Ceasefire13

The story of the formation of Bantay Ceasefire begins in 2001, when a new president initiated peace talks with the MILF. Security guidelines were agreed in the negotiations framework and provided for local ceasefire monitoring teams to be formed by commanders from the MILF, government leaders and international monitors from the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. By late 2002, the teams were being assembled.

Arnado and the MPC saw the security guidelines as an opportunity to include the conflict-affected communities in the formal peace process.14 She states:

Who better to be a ceasefire monitor than someone who is going to be directly affected by a violation of it? We wanted to participate in the ceasefire committee to help ensure that the ceasefire agreement would be implemented on the ground, right into our own communities. The best way to do that was to get to know what was going on and effectively assess the security situation by sitting in the ceasefire meetings.

The generals of the AFP and the MILF leadership argued, however, that civilians, particularly women, knew nothing about monitoring a ceasefire. Arnado recalls:

The members [of the committee], who were mostly field commanders, simply laughed at us. ‘You do not know anything about what we are discussing here. We are talking about military terms, military language, and situations which are far beyond your comprehension as women. This is not your place.’

Not resigned to being left out of the official process and determined to do something to stop the fighting, Arnado and the MPC created Bantay Ceasefire as an independent, community-based ceasefire monitoring group. It was, and still is, made up entirely of civilians – men, women, young and old – from the three ethnic communities on the island: Moros, indigenous peoples and Christians. Arnado emphasises, ‘Without a mandate from either the government or the MILF, Bantay Ceasefire can claim independence and impartiality in all our undertakings.’

The group's first mission was an assessment of the situation in Maguindanao province, where serious violations of the ceasefire were reportedly being carried out. The team needed safe conduct passes to access affected areas and interview civilians and the armed groups. By letter, they requested the passes from the AFP and MILF, but also sent letters to the negotiators of the peace process and the official ceasefire committee, informing them of their intended mission. They told them that a comprehensive report of their findings would be submitted to all actors in the conflict. The team was granted the passes and carried out its first mission in January 2003 and presented its findings.

The group was soon receiving praise for its work in monitoring another ceasefire declared after the 2003 Buliok War. Lieutenant-General Rodolfo C. Garcia of the AFP stated in 2004, ‘We have seen how the Bantay Ceasefire team helped in the common desire of both the government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, to preserve peace on the ground … I think credit has to be given where credit is due’ (Eviota 2005).

Beyond documenting ceasefire violations, the group also assesses the needs of those displaced by the violence, disseminates information and trains groups on the provisions of the ceasefire agreement. In its recommendations in each field report, it demands that violators of the ceasefire be held to account. Bantay Ceasefire has also undertaken investigative missions as a third party beside the government and MILF, including a fact-finding mission to the island of Basilan in 2007, after 14 AFP soldiers were beheaded and the MILF was blamed. The inclusion of the independent Bantay Ceasefire helped to determine that it was not the MILF that was responsible, but Abu Sayyaf, thus preventing a resurgence of fighting between the AFP and MILF (Noma et al 2007: 40).

The group's role in the aftermath of the debacle of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) has been significant. The MOA-AD was crafted through four years of discussions on defining the ancestral homeland of the Moro people. It was agreed to and initialled by the government and MILF in late July 2008. But at the official signing ceremony in August, the Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order on the signing, and later the court ruled the agreement unconstitutional. Fighting between the MILF and AFP broke out immediately, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians and increasing the need for Bantay Ceasefire's work across the island.

The peace process has been inching forward since 2009, and the International Monitoring Team (IMT), which had departed when conflict resumed in late 2008, returned to the island. The IMT is now composed not only of representatives of nation-states, but also civil society organisations, including the MPC for its expertise and impartiality through the work of Bantay Ceasefire.

Lessons learned

Arnado saw an opening in the official peace process and believed it was a strategic way to involve civil society. When shut out of that process, she and the MPC developed their own parallel structure of engagement – one so successful that they were eventually included in that official process, making it more legitimate for those who bear the brunt of violence and displacement in Mindanao. In that sense, the formation of Bantay Ceasefire was a deliberate attempt to connect the horizontal peace process (happening at the grassroots level among civilians in the three communities) with the vertical process occurring at the highest levels of leadership in the government, military, armed rebel group and international community.

Though the group is now included in the IMT, its impartiality remains a key to its legitimacy and success, which is why it is respected by all the parties to the conflict. It investigates violations of the ceasefire regardless of which group is suspected. But impartiality does not imply neutrality; Bantay Ceasefire is firmly on the side of civilians.

At its creation during a time of heightened tension on the island, Bantay Ceasefire became a trusted channel of dialogue between and among the security sector, armed parties and civil society. It remains so to this day. The group also serves as an impetus for dialogue among conflicting parties at the community level. In Bantay Ceasefire, women work alongside men, youth beside their elders, and Christians together with Muslims and indigenous people. A volunteer monitor, Dinah Monticello, a Christian, explains:

Being in dialogue with the Maranaos [a Moro tribe] can be misconstrued as a betrayal … I don't mind these comments any more even if sometimes I get deeply hurt. What is important is my faith that the peacemaking work that I am doing is very much pleasing to God. If that is anti-Christian to some people, so be it. I realised that we are all victims here, whether you are a Muslim or Christian (Arnado 2011).

Another major accomplishment of Bantay Ceasefire has been the empowerment of civilians, who have largely been relegated to victims and repeatedly displaced and disempowered by the violent conflict. Without the opportunity to influence the conflict toward resolution and peace, civilians risk being recruited for the fighting, whether as rebels or armed civilian militias for local governments and militarised communities. As a volunteer, Brenda Alvarico, recalls:

I joined Ceasefire Watch because I wanted to help powerless people like myself … I will go into these dangerous places, even though I know I am entering the jaws of death, because it is my only hope to highlight what is happening on the ground. I don't care if I die doing this. Death will be okay as long as I have done something to help my fellow people who are poor just like me. I do this because poor people like us mean nothing to those in power (101 East 2008).

The creation and work of Bantay Ceasefire is a prime example of civil-military cooperation and a whole-community approach to peacebuilding (Schirch 2006, 2010), an emerging issue in the fields of peace and development. Its accomplishments – gaining access to official processes, being a trusted channel of dialogue, negotiating among local communities and empowering civilians – offer lessons for replication in similar situations.

Luz Méndez of Guatemala: A Woman at the Table

According to a 2010 report by UNIFEM (part of UN Women), in 14 peace negotiations for which there were such data, fewer than 8% of participants were women, and fewer than 3% of signatories to peace agreements were women. What does it mean when women sit at the negotiation table? Is there a tangible impact?

The following case study examines the role played by Luz Méndez, a Woman PeaceMaker at the IPJ in 2004, when she was one of the only women involved in peace talks between the Guatemalan government and the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG), or the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity. The talks resulted in the Agreement on a Firm and Lasting Peace in 1996, ending more than three decades of internal armed conflict.

36 years of civil war

From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala was engulfed in a brutal internal armed conflict marked by a series of coups and/or rigged elections and military dictatorships. One of the roots of the civil war lay in the overthrow, backed by the United States, of the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who had instituted a series of socioeconomic and democratic reforms that the U.S. likened to communist policies. In reaction to the military's brutal tactics after Arbenz was overthrown in 1954, the opposition movement spread across Guatemala, and in 1960, the political and social movements began creating insurgent organisations. As Cross explains,

security forces began using forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial executions as methods of state control and governance – systematic techniques to discourage agitation for social changes. While some opposition, or perceived opposition, leaders were shot outright or kidnapped and then left tortured or burned in the streets, others were taken by security forces. They were ‘disappeared’ – generally tortured, killed, and quite literally thrown away into volcanoes, rivers, the sea, or buried in mass graves (2004: 8).

Similar methods intensified in the early 1980s, and the army instituted a scorched earth policy in the countryside, leading to the murders of thousands of civilians who the government claimed were supporting the guerilla movement. Indigenous people were disproportionately affected by the conflict, having suffered historic oppression and discrimination (Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification 1998).

On the political scene, an official peace process began in 1991. The government and the URNG, a coalition of the opposition revolutionary organisations, agreed to an 11-point agenda and framework for what would become a five-year negotiation. Cross summarises this first agreement on the framework:

[T]he process of the talks had to address the underlying roots of the armed conflict, such as socioeconomic inequalities, political exclusion, and ethnic discrimination; the tackling of these issues would help generate sustainable peace. Therefore, the negotiations included discussion of substantive issues, such as human rights, the status of indigenous peoples, socioeconomics, democratisation, the role of the army in political life, and the resettlement of refugees and internally displaced persons. The process had to simultaneously discuss the operational topics of ceasefires, disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of the URNG, and other measures to end the armed conflict (2004: 21).

In December 1996, the final peace accord was signed between the armed parties, thus ending 36 years of civil war.

At the peace table

When the formal peace process began in 1991, Méndez had been a member of the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT), or Guatemalan Labour Party (working underground) for 15 years. When the PGT joined the URNG and official talks began with the government, Méndez was appointed to the coalition's political-diplomatic team, part of the delegation at the negotiations. She was the only woman representing the URNG; there were no women in the governmental delegation until the final year of negotiations.

‘I must confess that at the very beginning I was not aware of the gender dimension,’ Méndez recalled (Cross 2004: 23). During her activist days in the student movement at the University of San Carlos, she was one of many women leaders who did not seem to suffer discrimination based on their gender. But in a year at the peace table, she faced a frustrating inequality in relation to her male colleagues. With the help of an exiled branch of the Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas (UNAMG), the National Union of Guatemalan Women, Méndez began to understand ‘why I was not treated as an equal with men even though we shared the same goals of social change, the same risks, the same work. I immediately began a process of gender awareness’ (Cross 2004: 23).

The revolutionary nature of the first agreement establishing an agenda and framework for the talks allowed Méndez an opening to raise issues of gender inequality and discrimination, and to emphasise how without addressing those, the peace accords could not fully involve the whole society in their implementation.

In 1994, the Assembly of Civil Society (ACS) was formed – essentially a parallel table of dialogue consisting of diverse civil society organisations who wanted to have input in the official talks. The ACS could offer proposals and recommendations to the official delegations, who then decided what to include in their own discussions and proposals in the negotiations. Though Méndez was essentially cut off from women's organisations in Guatemala (the official talks took place in Mexico and other countries), she was constantly on alert for any women's demands that came through ACS documents, and pushed them through to the URNG.

One of her greatest successes involved the intersection of women's and indigenous rights. When she first attempted to include a specific section on indigenous women in a URNG proposal on indigenous rights in general, men in her delegation – including indigenous advisors – strongly resisted. As Cross (2004: 26) highlights, ‘Luz, the sole woman – and a mestiza woman at that – was left to confront the men on behalf of indigenous women’.15 Méndez focused on the economic statistics, which were impossible to dispute: indigenous women suffered a ‘double burden’ and were the most impoverished sector of the Guatemalan society.

‘I don't want to convey the message that this was easy,’ Méndez stated, ‘but they accepted everything I proposed’ (Cross 2004: 27). The result of her forceful arguments and indisputable data was the inclusion of the proposal in the historic Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It established an Office for the Defence of Indigenous Women's Rights and set penalties for sexual harassment against indigenous women. Including those in the agreement on indigenous peoples, gender provisions are in five of the eventual accords.

Méndez credits her attendance at the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, China, in 1995 as another catalyst for her continued commitment to including women's rights in the final accords. ‘I came back with the Platform for Action under my arm that affirmed the right of women to take part in peace negotiations. That strengthened me,’ she recalled (Cross 2004: 28).

Lessons learned

As mentioned, Méndez took advantage of the substantive nature of the first agreement as an opening to discuss discrimination against women and indigenous people that contributed to direct and structural violence. Anderlini has analysed the contributions of women in formal peace negotiations and observes:

They see peace negotiations as a moment in history and a critical window for change, a time when opposing sides tackle principles of democracy, freedom, self-determination, liberation from racial or ethnic oppression, and equality (2007: 62).

Méndez took seriously the language of the initial agreement that went beyond talk of ceasefires and disarmament to issues that could lead to a sustainable peace.

The effect on the talks was profound. Anderlini (2007: 74) again:

For women in peace negotiations, the challenge is … not only to tackle the key agenda items but also to raise other issues … Those who succeed alter the substance of the talks by introducing new issues to the agenda and providing new insights. They affect the process, dynamics, relations, and ways in which negotiations are conducted. But perhaps most importantly, they come to the table with a more holistic understanding about the actual purpose of the talks and the centrality of interdependence.

To buffer Méndez's own holistic understanding, she utilised the important parallel institution of the ACS to channel the voices of women's groups to the official table. Originally excluded from the ACS, women's organisations ‘forged a strong alliance, developed a common agenda and forcefully argued their proposals within the ACS’ (Cross 2004: 24). With a united message, they were difficult to ignore. As the women's demands made their way into ACS proposals to the official delegations, Méndez made it a point to keep watch for them. ‘I was so happy to see inclusion of women's demands in assembly documents. It strengthened me. I made the decision to defend those proposals in order to ensure their inclusion’ (Cross 2004: 25).

Méndez's experience also highlights the significance of regional and transnational linkages to mobilise and amplify women's voices, and ensure the demands of the grassroots and indigenous women make it into policy discussions. In defending the needs of indigenous women in Guatemala, Méndez used evidence – statistics and the historical cultural context – specifically from the country to make her case to her delegation. But when she connected with the network of women mobilising in Beijing, the issues faced by Guatemalan women and the challenges she faced as a woman negotiator were put into a global context. In one poignant example, Méndez was struck by the regret of a female commander of El Salvador's revolutionary Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front that women in her country had been unable to include provisions for women in their peace accords, despite their strong participation in both the armed struggle and at the highest levels of the peace negotiations. That exposure strengthened Méndez's commitment to women. She vowed that she ‘wouldn't like to say the same thing when the Guatemalan peace negotiations finish’ (Cross 2004: 28).

In addition to motivation and inspiration, global connections provided concrete resources for Méndez to use at the negotiation table. The Beijing Platform for Action and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women gave international legitimacy and grounding to the demands of the Guatemalan women. Both documents supported Méndez's assertion to the official parties that women's rights needed to be protected in order to address the structural and societal violence and inequality that had given rise to Guatemala's insurgency. The inclusion of these provisions in the accords has been the foundation for all the demands, proposals and social mobilisation the women's groups have raised to defend and advance their rights during the complex stage that followed the end of the war.

As one of only a handful of women to sign peace accords to end armed conflict around the world, Méndez recognised that her experience gave her the ability to speak to and for women's increased participation in peace processes. Along with a coalition of women, she pushed for the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and became part of a small group of advisors working with the UN on other peace negotiations. She also recognised the parallels that existed between her experience in Guatemala and that of other women and conflicts on other continents, despite the disparate contexts. After consulting for women's groups during the Burundi peace process, she reflected:

I don't think all women are the same, but I think all women confront the same problem called gender oppression. I was touched by what I heard and what I saw, to feel the suffering of women and to feel their power at the same time. I realised that my experience could be useful. That was what moved me (Cross 2004: 42).

Though she has been one of the very few women who have participated in an official peace negotiation to end armed conflict, Méndez's example shows that there can be a tangible impact when women sit at the table and have a voice in what gets discussed and debated when peace agreements are being crafted.

Zandile Nhlengetwa of South Africa: Reconciliation Writ Small

In The Moral Imagination, Lederach notes:

We must set our feet deeply into the geographies and realities of what destructive relationships produce, what legacies they leave, and what breaking their violent patterns will require … we must venture into the mostly uncharted territory of the artist's way as applied to social change, the canvases and poetics of human relationships, imagination and discovery (2005: 5).

This case study of Zandile Nhlengetwa, a community development worker, describes one woman's story of reconciliation and its implications for her community.

Nhlengetwa, from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, was a Woman PeaceMaker at the IPJ in 2008. For many years she worked with the organisation Survivors of Violence, designing and implementing peacebuilding intervention strategies in high-crime communities struggling to find security after the era of apartheid. She lived through apartheid, the death of her husband (an activist with the African National Congress, or ANC), the firebombing of her home and the murder of her son. But it was through her personal journey of reconciliation – involving her, the young men who killed her son and the mothers of those young men – that Nhlengetwa found her most meaningful peacebuilding work.

Apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa16

The policy of apartheid in South Africa began officially in 1948, though the groundwork had been laid for decades. Major resistance to apartheid and violent crackdowns against it lasted well into the 1990s. In addition to black resistance to the apartheid government, in the 1980s rivalries within the black resistance movement – fostered by state support for the Inkatha Freedom Party against the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the ANC – degenerated into conflict. Tens of thousands of South Africans died as a result of this violence.

After apartheid ended in the 1990s and Nelson Mandela became president, the governed faced the task of repairing the decimated body politic. The formal vehicle for national reconciliation was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which aimed primarily to provide restorative justice for victims. Commencing in 1995, its mandate was to investigate the context in which gross violations of human rights had occurred between 1960 and 1993. The TRC was given the power to grant amnesty after full disclosure if an action was seen to have been perpetrated in the name of political ideology. The TRC report was released in 1998, branding apartheid a crime against humanity and also finding the ANC accountable for human rights abuses. The government went to court to block the report, arguing that it put violence by all parties on the same moral plane. Although inadequate on several fronts, the TRC in South Africa stands as a resource for reconciliation (Wilson 2001; Krog 1999).

In 21^st century South Africa, white domination and apartheid are no longer the key political issues; however, the effects of a system of institutionalised racial and class oppression and resulting culture of violence are deeply entrenched. The country continues to be divided along racial lines, and although South Africa has the continent's biggest economy, much of the population is impoverished. Rural populations in particular experience de facto discrimination and lack good education and healthcare. Women continue to bear the brunt of such discrimination and inequality.

Reconciliation and the formation of Harambe Women's Forum17

In 2004, 10 years after South Africa's first democratic elections, Nhlengetwa was working for Survivors of Violence, designing and implementing peacebuilding interventions in communities with high levels of violence. One evening while driving through an area of Durban known as Mshayazafe, she, her son Xolani and her colleague, Themba, were approached by four teenage boys. They weren't there to steal anything. They were there to kill. Xolani was shot in the chest and died in Nhlengetwa's arms. Their motive was unknown.

Within 24 hours, police had arrested Thulani Nzama and Nhlanhla Dube, both 15 years old and guilty of a long list of previous offences. This was not their first time in police custody; however, because they were juveniles they had always been released into their family's charge after a short detention.

Grief, in the form of anger, consumed Nhlengetwa. It had been nearly 15 years since she endured the murder of her husband and the bombing of her home. The anguish and resentment she had kept pent up erupted. She wanted the boys who had killed her son to be sentenced to a lengthy prison term and for justice to be served. She believed that this, and only this, would relieve her suffering.

A magistrate sentenced the boys to 20 years in prison. In the aftermath, Nhlengetwa returned to her work as a peacebuilder. But as she preached reconciliation and advocated forgiveness, she nurtured anger and vengefulness within her. She felt like neither a peacebuilder nor a Christian – she was a fraud. The words of Jesus' disciple Paul rang true to her: ‘If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.’ Nhlengetwa decided she needed to heed her own teachings.

The first step on her own journey to reconciliation was to visit Thulani and Nhlanhla. When she first met the boys in the prison, she slid her hands through the small hole in the wire screen and grasped their hands. Nhlengetwa sobbed; the boys sat in silence. In them she saw her son. For the first time she grasped the rejection, sadness and fear that characterised their lives. She understood that these boys were innocent; it was the system that was guilty.18

Ultimately, the relief she had sought in punishing Thulani and Nhlanhla came through the process of forgiving them. As she savoured this sense of liberation, she thought of the mothers of the boys and wanted to share her journey of reconciliation. Two years after the boys were sent to prison, she went to visit their mothers, Sibongile and Lindiwe. To them, Nhlengetwa was the enemy.

Nhlengetwa's instinct had compelled her to arrive uninvited on Sibongile's doorstep; now that she was there, she could only talk and hope the women would listen. She told them of her visit to the prison. Sibongile asked, ‘What business do you have visiting our sons? Why are you here?’ Nhlengetwa responded, ‘I am here because I care. Because your sons were the same age as my son. Because I want us to talk about what happened to us. My son is dead. Your sons are like dead in prison. We all have something in common that binds us. We don't have loved ones. And what binds me to come here is that we are all mothers. We are women.’

Nhlengetwa returned every two weeks, hoping to gain the women's trust over time. They never invited her back, but they never chased her away.

Several months later, the mothers invited other women to join them when Nhlengetwa visited. She had brought food and divided it among the eight women. Soon the conversation turned to exchanging recipes and speaking of their families. All the women were single mothers whose husbands had died during the struggle, and some had lost children to violence, AIDS, or prison.

Soon all the women were meeting every two weeks to discuss the challenges they and their communities were facing, eventually forming the Harambe Women's Forum and inviting more women to join in their ‘empowerment gatherings’. After a long process of building trust, they began to meet regularly on the premise that ‘when you've been hurt you are able to understand the pain and hurt of other people. And you are able to help them. We are wounded healers.’

Nhlengetwa and the women were driven by the uncertain hope that they could make a better future for their children. In the face of devastating poverty, violence and trauma, they were striving to do the near-impossible: earn an income, develop their communities and build peace. Consistently they confronted the same challenge of being poverty-stricken. Having opted out of the illegal economy (brewing beer and selling drugs) and in need of income, the women pooled funds to open a small shop and purchase a plot of land for vegetable cultivation. It was not enough. Each of the 20 women needs money to buy food, pay school fees, reinforce her mud hut and clothe her children. As a group, they need the funds to hold monthly meetings and coordinate public workshops. For now, they focus on funding a march for mothers, and have approached a human rights organisation about facilitating education for young prisoners. Eventually they would like to invest in literacy classes, so that someday more than just two of the 20 women will be able to read and write.

Lessons learned

Nhlengetwa's personal experience and the development of the Harambe Women's Forum exemplify a necessary foundation for all grassroots peacebuilding work: personal healing. The complexity of relations between and within communities during apartheid had torn apart the social fabric of society – there was still anger and hatred, distrust and ill will. In order to build lasting peace it was necessary to start from the place of these emotions. Personal reconciliation through building trust, healing trauma and personal empowerment has been recognised as a prerequisite to societal rebuilding. In Nhlengetwa's case, personal healing entailed providing space for people to reflect and reconnect with themselves, their dreams for the future, and each other, primarily through storytelling – individuals telling their own stories and listening to one another's. The activity was non-threatening yet created space for people to express the pain, anger and frustration they were carrying. Out of this emerged stories of their families, and eventually their pain.

Nhlengetwa's story affirms that from a solid foundation of personal healing, holistic community initiatives can be built. Typically, conflict is framed in terms of what was done by the government, the police or large-scale groups and, consequently, resolution occurs at a high level. It is easier to talk about conflict at this level – for the most part it isn't about the people you live with, or alongside. Violence that happens within families, neighbourhoods and affinity groups often receives minimal attention. However, this is the violence that causes communities to disintegrate. Building sustainable peace requires addressing this by including processes for reconnecting individuals, rebuilding trust and re-establishing everyday values – a process also known as horizontal peacebuilding.

In doing so, it is critical to listen to and work from the position of the people – to take seriously their perception of the conflict and what they see as priorities for intervention (Scully 2009). Integral to this is taking into account the secondary effects of large-scale violent conflict, e.g., domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse, child abuse, unemployment, illiteracy and substance abuse. It is these factors that impact individuals' everyday lives and which therefore constitute peacebuilding that is relevant. For youth, peacebuilding may mean income-generation projects. For women in the Harambe Women's Forum, peacebuilding may entail literacy or skills-building classes. It is impossible, and irrelevant, to use one standard model to promote peace. Peacebuilding must be framed as encapsulating economic, community and social development and, as such, be defined by the people it is intended to impact.

As Nhlengetwa says of her involvement with the forum:

I've worked in communities for many, many years but my sense of achievement is what I am experiencing now, in a way I never have in the past. Working with that group of women – it's like for the first time I've just touched the nub of community development.

Notes

¹The term ‘Women PeaceMakers’ is intended to encompass women's multiple roles in pursuit of sustainable peace and social justice. Thus, in this article ‘peacemaking’ and ‘peacebuilding’ are used interchangeably.

²UNSCR 1325, in addition to calling for increased protection for women during armed conflict, ‘urges member states to ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels in national, regional and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict’, and ‘calls on all actors involved, when negotiating and implementing peace agreements, to adopt a gender perspective … ’

³See Scully 2012 and Pratt and Richter-Devroe 2011 for criticisms of Resolution 1325 and its outcomes.

⁴The detailed narratives of each of the Women PeaceMakers are available at the IPJ website at http://www.sandiego.edu/peacestudies/ipj/programs/women_peace_makers/

⁵There is another programme known as Women Peacemakers that is administered by the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. Unlike the IPJ's WPM Program, which focuses on documentation, IFOR's is a training programme.

⁶The structure of the final publication changed in 2008. Publications between 2003 and 2007 are long narrative pieces without complementary components, such as a conflict history and a timeline integrating political occurrences in the country and the personal developments of the peacemaker.

⁷The IPJ has used this adapted model of Kriesberg's cycle for several years, including in presentations at the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations, in the field through the Nepal Peacebuilding Initiative, and in Taylor's presentation at the IPJ's 2008 conference, Crafting Human Security in an Insecure World.

⁸The remaining sections are adapted from the unpublished master's thesis of one of the authors (Noma 2008).

⁹An emerging field in peacebuilding is the gendered examination of masculinity and how it influences post-conflict dynamics for securing women's rights (Hamber 2010; Scully 2010).

¹⁰For a useful chronology of the evolution of the term ‘peacebuilding’ within the United Nations, see the booklet titled ‘Peacebuilding: An Orientation’ prepared by the Peacebuilding Support Office, 2011.

¹¹The authors thank Mary Ann Arnado, Luz Méndez, Zandile Nhlengetwa, Alicia Simoni and Maia Woodward for their contributions to the case studies.

¹²Much of this section has been adapted from the ‘Conflict History’ section in Simoni (2009), as well as historical information in Woodward (2005).

¹³This section is largely adapted from the chapter ‘Bantay Ceasefire’ in Woodward (2005), and all quotations credited to Arnado are from this work.

¹⁴When Bantay Ceasefire was formed, the MPC was part of the Initiatives for International Dialogue.

¹⁵ Mestiza and mestizo refer to people of mixed indigenous and European descent.

¹⁶Much of this section is taken from the ‘Conflict History‘ in Simoni (2008).

¹⁷This section contains excerpts from the chapters ‘A Resounding Gong’ and ‘We are Wounded Healers’ in Simoni (2008).

¹⁸Gobodo-Madikizela (2003) went through a similar process of trying to understand one individual who had perpetrated extreme violence during apartheid.