Making Women Count for Peace: Gender, Empowerment and Conflict in South Asia

​PRIO Global Fellow Professor Priyankar Upadhyaya was invited by the President of the United Nations General Assembly to participate in a roundtable discussion at the High-level Forum on the Culture of Peace at the UN Headquarters on 13 September 2019. 

The second issue in 2017 the PRIO Gender, Peace and Security Update is now out. 

The lead story in this issue includes an interview with researchers Christine Amisi (ICART) and Gudrun Østby (PRIO) about their research on support programmes for survivors of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

​In an attempt to analyse how gendered political power transforms in situations of conflict, WISCOMP organised a Policy Dialogue titled "Women and Peacebuilding"  with the underlying assumption that differences in the forms and expressions of gendered power relations, during and after conflict, impact on how "empowerment" can be achieved. The publication "Women and Peacebuilding: Engendering Policy" gives an overview of the presentations and debates at the Policy Dialogue. 

​The Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (MCRG) and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) are jointly organizing the International Conference on "Gender, Empowerment and Conflict in South Asia". This is the final conference for a collaborative project entitled Making Women Count for Peace: Gender, Empowerment and Conflict in South Asia. Funded by the Research Council of Norway's INDNOR and NORGLOBAL programmes, the project aims to generate new knowledge and debate on women's empowerment and the challenges facing implementation of UNSCR 1325 in Nepal and India. With a focus on Northeast Indian experiences and a comparative look at Nepal, the project addresses the role of women in local governance and politics, particularly within the context of peace and security processes.

​Rita Manchanda is Senior Program Executive at the South Asian Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) and holds an MA in Philosophy and International Relations from the University of Geneva. A journalist, writer, researcher and human rights activist, she has dedicated much of her work to bridging the deep divides between India and Pakistan. She advocates for the integration of women peacebuilders into the policy arena, firmly believing in the vision of alternate, people-focused security and the power of participatory democracy. She is also the founder and a national committee member of the Pakistan India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy, and an active member of the Indian nuclear disarmament movement. Her many publications include the edited volumes Women, War, and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency (Sage 2001) and States in Conflict with Their Minorities: Challenges to Minority Rights in South Asia (Sage 2010). Rita Manchanda is currently carrying out research for the PRIO project ‘Making Women Count for Peace: Gender, Empowerment and Conflict in South Asia’.

Workshop objectives

The aim of this workshop is to discuss and share information about the efforts of women in Northeast India to promote peace and women’s empowerment, whether as activists, members of social movements, politicians, writers, or in any other capacity. The objective is to gain a better understanding of the efforts and challenges as seen by women themselves, to enable the researchers to ask more relevant and better questions when they carry out their fieldwork. Ultimately, this should help us to communicate to policy-makers how women in conflict settings can work for peace and empowerment, and what empowerment means to women in these contexts.