RADIO INTERNACIONAL FEMINISTA-FIRE
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Nobel
Women´s Initiative meets with activists and scholars: women as peace
builders,
Washington
D.C More
than thirty peace and women’s human rights advocates from around the
world met January 28-29 at the Airlie Conference Center in Warrenton,
Virginia to share assessments and strategies regarding the positioning of
women’s rights, along with their perspectives on issues of war and
conflict situations in the world. “Solutions and Sound Bytes” was the
title of the global event. Advocates,
journalists, communicators, academics, movie producers, activists and a
Nobel prize winner gathered under the auspices of the Nobel Women's
Initiative (NWI) to develop shared inputs for the Nobel women regarding
how to “more effectively amplify the voices of women” and “the
centrality of women's rights in peace building around the world,” which
is what the NWI initiative stands for. The
NWI is comprised of Shirin Ebadi from Participants
at the NWI meeting represented a variety of organizations, including The
Women´s League in Burma, One Million Signatures Campaign by Women in
Iran, FEMLINK in Fiji, The Sudan Women’s Empowerment for Peace, Peace
Women Project by WILPF New York office in the USA, Just Associates --
Washington D.C. office in USA, The Center for Global Justice at the
Berkeley Law School in the USA, The Global Justice Center in the USA,
Urgent Action Fund in Africa, The Women’s Initiative for Gender Justice
towards The International Criminal Court (ICC), represented by a South
African staff, among others. The chair of NWI Jody Williams from the Facilitated
by Joanna Kerr of Oxfam ”Exploring
these issues together is critical because that is how we work,“ stated
Liz Bernstein as she opened the first day’s session that addressed the
role of media and messaging of women. “Interests,
habits and rules that we all have are what influence how we make the
stories,” said Aly Miller from the Addressing
women as advocates, not only as victims was a central theme. How women and
their organizations approach media work and messaging to further the
agenda of peace and security globally was also debated. “Simplicity of
message does not clash with the complexity of issues,” was one concern
regarding media work. In this sense, community radio and international
radio and media in the hands of women have made a significant contribution
because they are more likely to delve deeply into issues while allowing
women advocates, victims and survivors to frame their stories, going far
beyond the “10 second sound byte.” This was the message from FIRE and
FEMLINK at the meeting, while adding that there should be no dichotomy
between the work of women in feminist media, and efforts of women and men
in mainstream media, because both play different roles that can complement
each other: One provides the
full stories in the voices of women, and the other sometimes turn these
into sound bytes. Brigitte
Shur, Director of the Regional Coordination of the Women’s Initiative
for Gender Justice
(WIGJ), an independent NGO that works to lobby the International Criminal
Court to include gender, explained how in the case of a very concrete
action in Northern Uganda where the Gender Caucus was addressing the
authorities, the women decided not to use the mainstream media so that
they could maintain the control of their own message and ensure it would
not be distorted to affect negotiations. This was called ¨the strategic
use of silence. In contrast, others at the NWI meeting pointed out to Shur
that there are situations when media in the hands of women serves a
critical role in amplifying the voices of the activist themselves,
bypassing the mainstream media agenda with media in which women can also
frame the news. Also
a focus of the NWI meeting was the contributions by women to peace
building that too often remain nearly invisible in media. Participants
shared some concrete experiences of women in Participants
also related examples of successful women's rights activism and advocacy,
but highlighting the need to interrogate ourselves about the ways in which
we may fail to make critical links between issues; for example poverty and
war, violence against women and all other forms of violence, rape as a
weapon of war and as a weapon in peace, etc. How
to better portray in media the work advocates do, proposals for renewed
strategies to approach media, and assessing some key messages that have
worked most powerfully in affecting decision makers and media were also
discussed. Media messages were designed to address campaigns in In
the case of About
The
women form A
special panel including Betty Murungi of Urgent Action Fund in Available
data by UNIFEM show that only 1.2% of signatories of peace treaties have
been women since the adoption of The
need for an approach where the intersectionality of militarism, war,
violence against women, poverty and financial markets was also highlighted
at the meeting. At
the final session of the meeting, participants made a renewed commitment
to continue working and supporting the Nobel Women´s Initiative and to
include them in their own efforts
in local, national, regional and global actions. Examples of this were
provided by Feminist International Radio Endeavour about the way in which
the NWI responded with statements upon the requests of
Las Petateras and Just Associates in Mesoamerica in three occasions
where in Jody
Williams pledged the NWI to strengthen the links between different efforts
worldwide to advance the perspectives and rights of women in the global
agendas. “There
is hardly such a thing as women’s issues because on the one hand, all
issues are the concern of women, and on the other, women’s rights are
everybody’s issues too.” For
more go to FIRE www.fire.or.cr Nobel
Women’s Initiative www.nwi.org (end)
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