Women as Agents of Peace

(Zubair Khuhro, )

Whenever we talk about peace, suddenly conflict comes in our minds and it directly goes to men which divert our mind towards men.It is well known that violent conflict indirectly affects women and girls and strength enpre existing gender inequalities and discrimination.It is directly related to the violence that exists in women's lives during peacetime. Throughout the world, women experience violence whether physical, psychological and sexual because they are women, and often because they suffer the imbalances of power relations.Remember women not as hapless victims, but as agents of change who invest in their families and communities and who have the potential to build peaceful and prosperous societies. Women with jobs are also far more likely than men to invest their income in food, education and health care for their families. With healthier and better educated children, societies can begin to end cycles of poverty and violence.

Women as mothers
Despite having important roles and responsibilities in their cultures, women have struggled to participate in the formal peace process, which has been dominated by men. women were wives and mothers, few worked outside the home, and except for royals born to power. Women taught their daughters and sons, proper behavior and the ethos of society, and impressed on them the importance of such values as honesty, uprightness and the necessity to compromise. As such, women have always been active promoters of harmony in the community, which can be referred to as a "culture of peace". This natural role of women is not unique to any ethnic group, but rather is generalized throughout the world.

Women as Mediators
Given the extent and significance of women’s peace activism it is surprising how uniformly women have been excluded from formal peace processes. UN women’s 2012 report Women’s participation in peace negotiations provides countless examples of women being excluded from the peace table by national leaders and the international community alike. International, as well as national, organizations employ minimal numbers of women as mediators and at times, none in total disregard of the international and regional legal frameworks in the name of protocols and resolutions.

Women in Peace building
Countries that are emerging from violent conflict may be potential sites of positive change for women. The profound effects of war on gender roles including women’s participation in labour previously seen as male only can sometimes produce new openings for women to influence social and political structures that, in peacetime, were closed to them. Big changes will happen if we can ensure that women play a key role in the design and implementation of peace building activities and give them a confidence to do so.It is time for women to come out of the shadows at the platform of peace. It goes without saying, men tend to dominate the formal roles in the current peace-building process. Power is unequally distributed between men and women and the majority of women do not have a voice in any local or national decision-making processes. Such inequalities cause formal peacebuilding activities and policies to suffer from insufficient understanding of the diverse communities in which they are representing.

Few years ago, a girl named Malala Yousufzai who brutally attacked by terrorists, now she is promoting peace throughout the world and became peace agent. But this is not at all, many women who were affected by men are now peace builders. Women’s roles in peace building across conflict areas, in the last decade, highlight the importance of moving women beyond the “humanitarian front of the story.” Women have and can continue to influence peace building processes so that they go beyond defining peace as the absence of violent conflict and focuses on the good governance and justice. Women need to be present to discuss issues such as genocide, impunity and security if a just and enduring peace is to be built.Women’s involvement in peacebuilding is as old as their experience of violence. Women are not “naturally” peaceful. Women have played a variety of roles throughout history that support war and other forms of violence, from warriors to supportive wives and mothers calling men to the battlefield.

So that’s all that I want to say that women are always remain as an agent of peace throughout the history and in current situation throughout the world.
 

Zubair Khuhro
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