PRIO Centre on Gender, Peace and Security

Led by Torunn L. Tryggestad

The PRIO Centre on Gender, Peace and Security is a resource hub at PRIO for gender, peace and security studies. Its activities include research and publishing, teaching, training and policy advice. The centre also holds conferences, seminars and workshops, providing a space for research and policy discussions among networks of national and international scholars, policymakers, NGOs, the media and students.

The centre was developed out of PRIO's Gender, Conflict and Peacebuilding Research project, which was established in 2006 in response to the need for more scholarly resources in Norway on gender in relation to peace and security. Over the past decade, the project has been central in positioning PRIO as a leading research environment on gender, peace and security, and the centre will continue to further develop PRIO's knowledge and expertise in this field. The project was led by Dr Torunn L. Tryggestad, senior researcher at PRIO and now Director of the GPS Centre. Read more about Torunn here.

The centre was profiled in a previous issue of the PRIO Gender, Peace and Security Update newsletter, available to read online here.

Sub-projects:

Equal Peace? Women’s Empowerment and Multicultural Challenges in War-to-Peace Transitions

Getting from war to peace is a delicate endeavour. International interventions, mediation and dialogue efforts, as well as transitional justice mechanisms are all geared toward building sustainable peace, and avoiding relapse into new conflicts. These are not neutral processes, however, but embedded with particular agreed-upon norms and desires for peaceful co-existence. These normative frameworks are multicultural and multi-religious in their very essence in that they are thought to be beneficial to all irrespective of culture and religion. In reality, however, these norms may be seen quite differently. Gender equality and women’s empowerment are examples of such norms and are strongly contested areas of politics. It is particularly in the intersection between global/supranational aims and local or national religious and cultural characteristics where these tensions come out most forcefully.

Nordic Women Mediators (NWM)

PRIO is one of the operational partners of the Nordic Women Mediators (NWM), a network of women from the Nordic countries with professional mediation and negotiations experience.

Inspired by a similar initiative in southern Africa, the Nordic governments endorsed the creation of the network at the Nordic African Foreign Ministers' meeting in April 2015. The NWM was officially launched in Oslo on 27 November 2015, followed by an international launch in March 2016 at the United Nations in New York.

Members

Publications

Book Chapter

Tryggestad, Torunn L. (2016) The gender(ed) impact of the Peacebuilding Architecture, in de Coning, Cedric; & Eli Stamnes, eds, UN Peacebuilding Architecture. the First 10 Years. London and New York: Routledge (97–108).