 She's a prolific writer, speaker, and I'm going to begin with her in taking us back before 2000, as she was one of the civil society drafters of the now renowned UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. She's going to begin by giving us a little background, and then I've asked each of the panelists in round one to really answer how did they become involved with this agenda? Because I want you to understand their diverse backgrounds, that it's not as if we went to grad school in this agenda. So Sanam, please begin. Do you want me to tell my personal and the story? Both. Okay, so thank you very much. One extra minute. One extra minute. Thank you very much. Very nice to be here with everyone. The personal side, I became sort of an accidental refugee exiled at the age of 11 with the Iranian Revolution, and essentially my life kind of, when I look back, it was women who looked after us. It was my aunts to begin with, my parents were stuck in Iran. And then afterwards when my mother was able to come out, again, it was women who looked after us, not because the men in our family didn't care, but because some of them were in jail. My uncle was stuck in Iran, he wasn't allowed out. My uncles who did come and had to seek refugee asylum weren't allowed to work. So our world was kind of interesting to see that women are maintaining normalcy and keeping things going, and the men were kind of a little bit stuck and struggling. I mean, they were still patriarchs, but it was quite interesting to see that division. And then this actually, that experience led me to my work, which was that I was interested in how do you bring about nonviolent conflict transformation in places and cases where you've had dictatorships and you want to move on to democracy without it becoming violent. I joined International Alert, which was one of the biggest NGOs at the time that worked on these issues. And we started working on the question of women because of Burundi and Rwanda. We had women on the ground in Burundi who were teachers and social workers and others, and I had a colleague who would work with them around conflict resolution and these women, she would bring them together around Hutu and Tutsi identity, but actually enable them to see that as women they had similar experiences, and so they became peace builders. In 1998 we had the first global conference of women in conflict, women from 50 countries, and that was my kind of aha moment. It was four years after the Rwandan genocide, and one of the women who stood up had lost 100 relatives, and she was talking four years afterwards, she was talking about peace and the need to move forward. And I just remember thinking, if she can do it, then I should be an advocate for people like her where I sit. And since then, I mean, Women's Alliance for Security Leadership is basically, we have partners in 40 countries, that's what we do, that these are the kind of people I work with. But that conference led us to recognizing that there wasn't a vocabulary and a framework for us to talk about women's experiences as peacemakers and women's experiences of conflict. And so we said, at the end of it, we said we want to have a campaign called the Women Building Peace Campaign, and one pillar was a policy pillar. We had a partnership pillar and a peace prize and a public pillar. We sent 50,000 postcards to Kofiana. The policy pillar had UN Security Council, EU, and the OSCE as targets for resolutions in 2000. I was sent to, by my boss, to go get a Security Council resolution. I had no idea what I was doing, I was really scared of her. So we came, I came to New York, we actually collectively worked with NGOs, with Women's Alliance International League for Peace and Freedom, Hague of Heal for Feast. But we brought together the voices of women who were peace builders in war zones at the time, from Uganda to Sierra Leone to the Middle East, et cetera. And that became the push to get the Security Council resolution. We went to the Bangladeshis and then, I mean, we kept meeting with Security Council members, including the Chinese and the Russians and everybody. And when the time came, we drafted our own resolution. We gave them the gold-plated version, knowing that it would go in and be negotiated down to something else. That was the story of how we got 1325 back in 1999, 2000. I don't think that I went, I mean, when we got it, Ford Foundation that funded the work was absolutely stunned. I don't think they really actually believed that we could get a Security Council resolution. But as I said, I was scared of my boss. I was like, I've got to get this done. Let me pivot there to Gary. Gary, you started out in Brazil, and you were working on projects related to violence in men. How did you get onto this agenda? Yeah, I mean, it starts even before then. I witnessed a school shooting more than 30 years ago in a high school. You know as I use those words what is the sex of the person who had a gun. You probably know the gendered reactions to what people did in that confusing moment. One person was killed, and more than 100 of us don't look at life the same way after that. And that, I kind of took me into a moment of how do we make men so? We're not born this way. This is socialized into us. How is it that we make men violent? And I suppose if you have an early life experience like that working in Central America during some of those bad years at the early 90s and then working in Bogota during what many people know as season one and season two of Narcos, and then living in Rio working with young men in the context of favelas doesn't, it seems understandable. And my question working with some local researchers in favelas in Rio was not what leads young men to be affiliated with gangs and a violent version of manhood, but I want to understand the resistance because it's really easy to come up with the equation that men are war, men are violent, but what we don't see nearly as much and what we don't give credit attention to is the resistance every day of men doing it differently and what makes that possible. So that question really has oriented Pramunda's work, we started in 97, with that question of how do we engage men as allies around gender equality in general, reducing violence against women and girls, reducing violence among men, and also the issue of identity. How do we promote alternative identities? Very mindful of how you can kind of change the word, but if you fill in, you know, choose an armed group, gang-related, standing army others, the way that we capture the identities of young men in very gendered ways, offering you an instant access to manhood by guns power and often with sexual favors to go along, and we can add to that list of how good we are of turning young men violent. I think that understanding for us has been a really key part of our programming. And after doing that for a number of years in Brazil, we got invited to partner with the World Bank and other organizations to take that lens elsewhere. Not to try to cookie-cutter, you know, any of our approaches, but to say if we can get men involved as allies, it is difficult, but it's not as difficult as it looks. And so really it's believing that there is a deeper, nonviolent humanity of men that needs to be part of this, and obviously WPS speaks to that as well, even if not deliberately. So I suppose the, you know, early on for us at Promunda, the equation is feminism needs men and men need feminism, if we're still allowed to use that word. And by the same token, the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda needs men, just as we as men need the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda. Yeah, that really settles in well for trying to bring a more full picture of really what this is about. Please bring in a fuller picture to the Women, Peace, and Security Agendas, Bonnie. Bonnie, how did you enter this through non-proliferation? I mean, tell us that story. Hello. Okay, great. Yes, thanks for having me at this great panel here. I was actually speaking at the Ford Foundation. I was actually at the Ford Foundation in 2005 when I first arrived, and my portfolio was U.S. Foreign and Security Policy, and I also did a lot of work on weapons and mass destruction issues. But I also inherited a portfolio of a former colleague in the area of conflicts. And through that portfolio, I started to learn about the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda initiative. But I didn't work a lot on it. It wasn't as clear in my mind, mainly because of the silos that exist, I think, between national security and some of the issues we're talking about in terms of the agenda. So even while I was working on conflicts and I was supporting work, dealing with peacekeeping and women's issues and child soldiers and a lot of those things, I wasn't as familiar with it because of the overall world in which I was doing my work. And then I went into the government. I continued to work on a lot of what they call hard security issues. And then when I left government in 2017, I got reengaged on a much stronger level because I had an opportunity to really think about how we need to improve the policies that we have on foreign policy and peace security and conflict issues so that we can have a much more representative foreign policy decision-making process that represents what the U.S. looks like and not what the U.S. doesn't look like. And hopefully that will help to improve the policies and the foreign policy issues that we are dealing with in terms of women's issues. But I also recognize the unique role that women of color have in the field and in the fact that so many of these issues do affect women of color in unique ways. I was also approaching it from a different angle as well, not just from the national security lens, but more of a global security lens. And so a lot of my work that I do now with my organization looks at issues of climate change and infectious disease and food and water security in addition to the traditional hard security issues. And in all of those areas there's a women's lens, there's a women's agenda, there's a women's peace issue in all of those areas, but it's still very siloed in my view. So we'll talk a little bit about that later. So I came to this area in kind of sideways, not to the additional way, but I think through this journey I've realized how important this agenda is to so many issues that we deal with that they're not really, but it's not really yet captured as it should be. Thanks. So sideways or vertical ways, Alex, what were your entry points for the women's peace and security agenda? I know human rights has been a critical area that you've worked in. Absolutely. Thank you so much. And thank you, Kathleen, for hosting us in Chantel for proposing this panel as well. And I just really wanted to thank everybody for the opportunity to be here today. So I came to it, my background is in international human rights and also in policy development and implementation. I've worked in a variety of fields, as Kathleen has mentioned, whether it's been in Congress or in the U.S. government, I was also a delegate to the United Nations on many occasions and at a large NGO working on international human rights issues, and now it's strategy for humanity. My turning point really was the war in former Yugoslavia, and that was when it seemed that the world woke up and saw systemic, systematic rape used as a tool, as a horrific tool in war. And after that we saw Rwandan Burundi and images, again, that were horrifying. Around that same time was when the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was being negotiated by nations all over the world. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the first female Secretary of State for the United States, empowered the U.S. delegation there, and all countries, when they finally adopted that statute, those that were present in negotiating this, succeeded in getting language that stated for the first time that rape and sexual violence could be crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. That was the first time that that was actually acknowledged in that way. And frankly it was a watershed moment also in the international human rights community. After working in the U.S. government, I went to Amnesty International, USA. And there we launched the first campaign on violence against women. And I have to say, it was important because it was the first time a mainstream human rights organization was truly elevating that issue and still being asked, isn't that just something that happens? It's like, no, there are norms and there are government responsibilities, whether this is in a conflict setting or whether this is in the home. And so there was very much a learning curve going on. So from there, I think that fast forward, or actually one more piece there, Sanam mentioned the world, some world conferences, there were two that were also pivotal. Well, one was the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna where the first special repertoire on violence against women was named with a mandate. And also then the World Conference, this fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, which galvanized governments and advocates all over the world to look at the status of women and to see this in the eyes of governance and national plans. And to look at what the conditions were, what the prevalence of violence was, and how that impedes gender equality and how that impedes achieving national goals. So all of that was a path. Two more pieces. One was that in the US Congress, the International Violence Against Women Act was one that was inspired by a congresswoman, Nita Lowy. I was lucky enough to be in a meeting with her where she challenged a few of us to say, by saying, if you really wanted to address global violence against women, what would you do? That's a great question. And how great to have it come from a member of Congress. So we created a very large coalition, extremely diverse, and that led to the introduction bipartisan of that bill, which was an education tool. From that large coalition stemmed many more coalitions later, including those focused on child marriage, those focused on girls' education, women's empowerment, women, peace and security. And through all of this process, continued engagement with the Congress eventually led to the Women, Peace and Security Act. Let's also remember that President Obama was the one who signed the executive order creating a national action plan on women, peace and security, and that President Trump signed the Women, Peace and Security Act into law. So I see all of this as an evolution and a progression, and that's how I've come to be involved. Thanks so much, Alex, and thanks for adding more history to this agenda, especially for people in our audience who wanted to add that information if they were telling their mom or dad about it. No, it's very important. It's critical to have these policy tools, though. Chantal, how did you come into this? Well, first of all, I want to thank everybody here to have accepted to be on the panel, and I think the diversity of the panel is also very reflective of the diversity of the members of the U.S. Civil Society Working Group on women, peace and security, and I would say more generally also of the WPS community globally. Now, when you asked me how I came to this agenda, this happened in the 1990s when I had to retool professionally. I was an arms control analyst, and with the end of the Cold War, nobody was interested in arms control anymore. You know, U.S.-Soviet arms racing was just no longer a preoccupation of the security community. Instead, the security community really started to worry about civil war, internal conflict. And what I realized is that analyzing and examining civil wars and internal conflicts really required a different analytical lens away from state security towards human security. And once you start looking at human security, you have to look at a whole range of issues, not just the buildup of arms, not just traditional defense issues, but access to resources, governance issues, et cetera. And what I gradually realized, this came to me not all of a sudden, it was a long process, is that when we would examine these problems, we would talk only about or with 50% of the population. And I started to realize that the sexism that I had encountered as a young arms control analyst in a very male-dominated field was actually based on very deep, systemic, unequal gender structures. And that these unequal gender structures were actually part of the problem. And so, you know, if you ask what is the essence of the WPS agenda, for me, it's really about gender equality and about the importance of having a gender perspective when we analyze national and international security challenges. And I think when we use a gender perspective, we also eliminate other inequalities that exist and that drive towards violence and conflict, you know, other inequalities including race, ethnic background, age, et cetera. So that's how I came to this agenda. No, no, no, it's such interesting pathways. And here we all sit today and we'll come back to some of those pathways. But I'm hoping now that we can really talk about some of the concrete examples of how this agenda, now almost 20 years as a policy, international policy, what does it really look like on the ground? And each of you have, you could spend the next hour giving us your resume on amazing work. Pick one that you think really has both expressed the women, peace and security agenda from your lens and perhaps had important lessons learned to share with this audience. And, you know, I'm now going to just let anybody who wants to talk. We've done the showcase. Well, I'll start. First of all, I would say if you weren't there this morning, President Johnson Searle have actually told you what this agenda is all about. And so if you weren't there, please go to the video that is on the USIP website. So I don't have to go into the details from a policy perspective because that's really where I sit, not so much in terms of fieldwork. So from a policy perspective, I think we've made some progress. The fact that a lot of policy makers now feel sort of obliged to at least pay lip service to this agenda is progress, one could say. We have nine resolutions from the UN Security Council, emphasizing the importance of inclusive participation, emphasizing protection from sexual violence with 82 countries that have developed national action plans to implement this agenda. Alex was mentioning the USWPS Act. And then we have some separate agendas that also recognize the importance of gender equality. I'm looking at the sustainable development goals, particularly goal five, that is all about gender equality, the use peace security agenda. So I think all this is progress, but I agree with President Johnson Searle of this morning when she says there's really no cause for celebration. Governments still do not integrate gender analysis in their policies. Women are still not invited to formal peace tables and look at what's happening in terms of Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, etc. And violence against women continues unabated. And then lastly, if you just look at the political environment globally, I think there is a lot of pushback actually against the gender equality agenda. There's the decriminalization of domestic violence in Russia, the suppression of feminist activists in China, anti-abortion policies in the US, regressive gender statements by European leaders, such as the Hungarian political leader, etc. And so I think we have made some progress, but we still have a lot of problems. And if you ask me, you know, is the glass half empty or half full, then I would say, you know, it's less than half empty. Oh, wow. Oh, there's some of your best practices or great examples. So yes, I think I'll follow Chantel because I'm more at a policy and leave it to others to talk about more of the work on the ground. I also have seen much more of a dialogue. And a lot of times things start with they take steps. And so I can honestly say that in the two years that I've been working on with my organization, I've definitely seen much more of a consciousness raising about the issue. I've seen a lot more interest in the work that I'm doing, particularly on the role of women of color on the issue. A lot of people who are reaching out to find more about these things. I can say that in my area of work, it's been traditionally very male, white male in a hard security field. It still is very much, but there are still, I'm noticing there's more women, younger women who are getting into the field, a lot more young women of color in the field. Hopefully that will continue because that's really important for the pipeline to keep going until people are in decision-making positions. And in some of the work that I've done in government, particularly during the Obama administration, and now looking at some of these international discussions, I'm seeing more of that taking place. Chantel, of course, mentioned the Sustainable Development Goals, of course. And if you read through some of the targets of the SDGs, you will see women and girls mentioned in quite a few of them. Of course, there's SDG-5, but even in SDG-3 in ensuring healthy lives and in poverty, you'll see much more of a gender lens. And hopefully as we meet these targets, we're actually making that happen. Much more of a recognition of the role of women in all types of areas. I was doing some other looking around and I was looking at the Women in Global Health and website and looking at some of the things there and just kind of quoting, we are united around a common belief that everyone has the right to attain equal levels of participation in leadership and decision-making, regardless of gender. And more than that, we are united in the knowledge that gender equality widens the talent pool as diverse perspectives and strengthens global health. If you look at climate change, the UN climate change site, climate change has a greater impact on those sections of the population in all countries. There are more, most reliant on natural resources for their livelihoods. Women commonly face higher risks and greater burdens from the impacts of climate change and situations of poverty and a majority of the world's poor women. Finally, even in food security, if you go to the Food and Agriculture Organization website, it says the first step towards women's empowerment and full participation in role development and food security strategies is a collection and analysis of gender desegregated data to understand role differences in food and cash crop reduction as well as men's and women's differential managerial and financial control over production. And so what this says to me is, of course, we'll have another question about what are the problems and what we need to fix. But there is much more of a recognition of the reason that we need to have a gender lens in policies in order for those policies to really be successful in the long run, because they won't be successful if you don't have that voice making sure that those policies can really achieve what you want them to achieve. So I'll leave it at that. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's helpful to have that policy lens to even go to the field. And now Sonam said she signaled to me that she has some. Thank you. So the agenda, what the agenda did and what we were very specific about was that it was bringing the human face of war into our international policy spaces so that your unit of analysis isn't just a country, but it's actually thinking about the people. And so the fact that we started talking about women's experiences opened the door from women. Automatically it became what about widows? What about disabled women? What about young women? What about older women? And then what about men? And I remember having in 2008 when they were trying to get resolution 1820 on sexual violence, we tried to get language in on men and boys as victims of sexual violence. And security council at the time cost them out. So we put gender neutral language like citizens and civilians and people. And I had a colleague of sorts of ours coming and saying, oh, this is just a women's agenda. And this is just international NGOs wanting more money for their own things. They didn't talk about men. And I said, I tried. You could have researched. We tried. Here's the red lines language. And by the way, we've had 3,000 years of this stuff. You guys could have gone ahead of us and talked about us. But we opened the door. And frankly speaking, on the ground, all the women peace builders I know talk about men and they work with men. And they're doing it for their sons and daughters. So it's interesting how women have been protecting men and actually enabling that life. So that, I think, is something that is finally coming up in terms of the global space. But when I think about it in terms of successes, I go to my partners. And I think about my partner, Hamzat al-Amin right now, who is literally on the front lines of dealing with Boko Haram and dealing with the girls who were abducted, who were brainwashed, who are failed suicide bombers, who are now out and she has to deal with them. And she's trying to give them some psychosocial, economic, et cetera, relief to rehabilitate them. I think of the women in Cameroon that we've just been working with and supporting, who did their own mobilizing and mediating. And we've helped them kind of nudge them into the, we actually literally like tried to help pay for their travel to get to the capital because they've now got into the national dialogue. I think of my Yemeni partners, who while the UN was talking and I don't know what they were doing, a group of detainee, or women mothers of detainees, were negotiating the release of detained people in Yemen. So this story of what is happening for me is, and when I think back to 20 years, back 20 years, and I think about what I've written 20 years ago, women at the peace table making a difference. Look it up. You'd be surprised how sadly fresh it still sounds. But when I think about what I was saying then and how I'm still saying it now, and I'm just older and more grumpy, what keeps me going is that we knew what we were, this was something real. We were ahead of the time. This is the reality of the conflicts that we're dealing with, all of the conflicts that we're dealing with now. Women rise up, women become activists. Not all women become peace activists because it's a really, really dangerous thing to do. But they're there, and the failure has been on the part of the international community. And that, I put it on anybody here who works for Big International NGO, the UN, governments, et cetera, because we continue to fail to recognize and elevate their voices. We still talk about empowering them. Honestly, the Afghan women, I know, they don't need them. They're risking their lives every day. We just need to enable. We need to open the doors and let them in and stop saying, oh, the peace table is only about the warring parties. It doesn't make sense. If that's the case, then the logic would be to arm the women and let them come in. That's not the direction that we want to go in. We want the recognition that peace actors are also actors and agents and deserve to be at the table. So it's kind of on the ground this incredible richness of work and courage. And then as you bring it up, it's this kind of stodgy inertia of can't do this and can't be done and bureaucracy and what I call apathy, amnesia and ad hocory, the triple A syndrome, ad hocory, apathy and amnesia and the total lack of accountability. You can be the envoy for this or the ambassador for that and you will be held accountable for all sorts of things. You will not be held accountable or penalized for not including women at the table or not consulting them. And until we change that paradigm and not having, until it's a cafeteria approach to, I want to do it or I don't want to do it, this we're going to have Groundhog Day over and over. Yeah. And we like your grumpiness. It's important. I'll give an example from our work in DRC. We were invited by the Swedish government in Manusko about seven years back to do a survey in North and South Kivu around men's reactions to displacement, their use of violence in women, their attitudes about partly the WPS agenda, which was Manusko had set up, among other things, ways for women to participate in the affected communities in local community governance. And a huge obstacle to that was these extremely high rates of conflict related rape. We knew from our research and others that between 25% and 40% of women in North and South Kivu had been raped at some point in the conflict. What was not looked at nearly as much was in about half of those cases women went home and their male partner kicked them out because he could not deal with the trauma related to it or lots of other things that happened when men are either made to watch or know what happened. And women kept saying at the amazing services offered at Ponzi Hospital in Heel Africa and other services that said women keep saying, what are we doing with their husbands? And again, I think this points to Sonam's point that women were concerned, but also women living every single day that his trauma, his internal ghosts, were taken out on her body every single day. And so we knew that it was much more than, let's not say Manuska, let's say that other UN mission that was there thought all you needed to do with men was say, stop doing that. And if we put this in a mission plan, it'll somehow just happen and men will stop using violence. And we said, it's probably more complex than that. So we set up a trauma supported trauma focus model that engages about two thirds of the men in the groups and the processes. Are men who have used violence against women about a third are men identified in the community who don't use violence or aren't known for using violence. And so the support and trauma informed groups that include couples as well as men, we also engage police and military because they were not taking seriously women's accounts of violence at the hands of their husbands. And a main reason for that is their own personal views about it. Not that they weren't told that it wasn't important, but their own personal views and their own very high rates of violence against their female partners. So this model works. And we know it works because we asked women about it. In a follow-up study where we went back to households two years later in a tracer study, 95% of the households that were involved in the program, women reported reduced violence from their partners which also allowed them to have more freedom of movement to participate more in paid work activities and to participate more in these community participation mechanisms that exist there. So I give this as an example to say we can't just kind of have these categories of men and women just count the numbers, we've got to understand those nuances. The cultural context of it, what harm and displacement mean in men's lives as well, how the harm and displacement in men's lives is, comes out on the bodies of women. So I give that as an example of change is possible even as we look at a place that back in 2011, 2012 was called the rape capital of the world and the worst place in the world to be a woman. And I think what we didn't think about is, well, what's going on with men that makes men so in this setting and how can we change the dynamic? So off of that is the other thing. Yeah, asking a whole different set of questions. Good gender analysis, truly. Alex. Thank you, I would just add a few points and one is that there's much more research now and data collection that there was previously and that has been immensely useful because it equips people for policy change and it equips people to then advocate. And the other piece I would add is that there's, there are many more two tiers that exist, at least tiers that exist. And so it is shameful that the peace talks that have been taking place between the US and the Taliban have locked out so many voices. And at the same time, I am so admired by the women in Afghanistan who have used every capacity to engage globally and have their voices be heard to their very best possibilities. And so that's something that demonstrates the struggle that exists, but how there are also opportunities to move forward. I also like to challenge all of us to play a game as you're listening to people. Frequently, someone will say, oh, a woman, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it will be said in a disparaging way. If you substitute woman for any other category of people, people would be shocked. They're like, oh my gosh, how could you say that about whatever category? And so to me, it's important for us to challenge that and it gets to the issue of gender equality. So the last issue that I was going to raise in this is as Kathleen said, a paradigm shift. But really focusing on this issue of equality, I wanted to show you a different kind of example of how this plays out. And that is that it wasn't all that long ago, although before some people in the audience were born, that the women senators and members of Congress took on the National Institute of Health. Why did they do this? Because NIH research was flawed. They were only considering men in their trial clinics and their medical trials. And so in none of these studies were the impact on women being taken into account. So with this and also with a woman named Dr. Ruth Kurchstein who was the first woman director of a major institute at NIH, they created the Office of Research on Women's Health and that led to groundbreaking findings which have included reductions now in breast cancer for example. The point is that it was women leaders who had this insight and identified this deep flaw in the analysis that was taking place because there was no gender analysis and there was no gender inclusivity. And if you apply that then to our security sector and our peace plans, why wouldn't we want to have every voice and all the talents in the room, the perspectives of talented men and women and to think about the consequences on men and women? And so that to me is an example of how everyone benefits when that analysis takes place. Yeah, you're singing to this choir here. I've been saying for years that gender analysis needs to be taught in architecture and engineering schools since they design how many stalls in women's bathrooms and car design, car design is a big one. But yes, gender analysis and what it means. Well, we have a few minutes just to do a one quick lightning round before we open it up to the audience. And we see some progress, we see some backtracking but we're looking at an anniversary, whether it is to be celebrated or not, I think it is to be noted that we have been at this for a long time. What are some of the opportunities right now and are there insurmountable challenges that we should be thinking about? Again, whoever's ever ready, Chantal, you're at it, thank you. Yeah, I'll start off. I don't wanna miss it. And very briefly, there are systemic challenges to this agenda and that is, you said it, it's the patriarchy, most of our societies and institutions are structured as patriarchies that is male dominated, male run entities that seek to perpetuate a gender hierarchy where men should and are in charge. And so that's a big problem. I think there is also both passive and active resistance to change. I think there are some misconceptions or ignorance about gender. There's some studies that when you look at US policymakers, the majority doesn't really know what is going on and I would invite everybody here to next time when you go to a gender titled event, bring your father, your brother, your uncle, your boyfriend because we need to really open up this conversation and then lastly money and data. But what I think is positive and what makes me optimistic is actually people that are sitting here on this panel and the people Sanam was talking about. It's the activists who have been driving this agenda and who will continue the charge regardless. Alex mentioned scholars. I think scholarship is very important as well. And then lastly, I would say international organizations have actually been very important in helping this agenda move forward and also in helping the activist articulate their needs. Lightning. Great, a few quick points. The positive is that there is growing recognition. It's still growing and so much more needs to happen. The two anniversaries, one is of course next year, 2020 with the 1325 resolution of Women, Peace and Security but the other one is 2021, which will be the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Women, Peace and Security Act, which is a good opportunity to reflect on what the United States has done at that time too. The other thing is that I agree with Chantal, we need more research. There's been an uptick in data collection. Much more needs to be there. We all see and know intuitively how important this is, but we need more gathering of the key data in ways that we can utilize it. In addition to that, I'd say in the US Congress right now, we have more veterans than we have in a long time, women and men. And I think that that is an opportunity for us because they are among the loudest voices championing Women, Peace and Security. They have served in Afghanistan, Iraq, they get it, they understand what it means when women are excluded and how that links directly to insecurity and greater conflict. And so that, I believe, is also an opportunity for us. I'm gonna give you another chance. One last one, hold it. I'm gonna just get us through and come back. Can I just say one last one? That's my last one, young people. Given the populations right now worldwide on young people, here in the United States, young people assume they have equal rights. In other parts of the world, young women and boys assume equality. This is a challenge that President Sirleaf mentioned today. It can go either direction and we really have an opportunity there. Preparation is all, yes. I think for me it would be education. I wanna echo what's already been said. We don't have time. So I don't need to expand on any of that. But just to say that we need to educate better on this issue. And there's still a lot of people who are not aware of what this is. The Women's Peace Security Agenda is. They don't really understand how it integrates with their work. I think we're lucky to have an audience that does understand. But we need to figure out how do we bring it into everything we do? I mean, there's so many things I work on and where in the areas of peace. But the agenda is not mentioned. It's not integrated into it. And I think that we're losing opportunities by not figuring out how to bring it into the work that we do. How do we change the lens of it so that we understand it's broader than what people think it is. And if we're talking about the role of women in peace and conflict and resolution, we have a role in so many different ways. But we're losing an opportunity to learn that and we're losing an opportunity to share that with people. So I think education is the most important thing. Very quickly, in addition to that, it's the silos. There's too many silos in some of these issues and that's also keeping the issue from being much more expressed in the different parts of peace, security, and conflict. Opportunity, I think it's fantastic that the last couple of years we've been using words like patriarchy, like toxic masculinity, even as they're frightening to some men, I think they become an opportunity to say what we mean and finally make visible that when we talk about violence against women, it's men's violence against women that we're talking about. And as we talk about not all men, we're talking about how we make masculinities in manhood. I think the use of that on social network, the use in spaces has made it more visible what we mean by engaging in a conversation around masculinities. It makes the conversation richer and it gives us ways that we create programming and approaches out of it. And the biggest obstacle I would say is also related to that. We continue with our demonization of young men of, and fill in the blank, Arab states, Muslim men, young men of color in this country, that those blind policies, whether we use them in the war on terror or whether we use them internally in this country and how we think we need to approach criminal justice, continues to create huge amounts of havoc that women feel every single day. Absolutely. I was gonna engage us in a thought exercise. Imagine if the last 19, 20 years, we had had Afghan women involved in all of the processes that the US engaged in. Imagine if we'd listened to the women of Iraq before the war and then we conducted the war and we imagined if we'd listened to them as we were present there. Imagine if we'd listened to the women of Yemen about whether the hell we should be supporting Saudi Arabia to bomb children in Yemen. Imagine if we'd listened to the women of Israel and Palestine who have been working together generation after generation in for peace, right? Just imagine if we had done all of that in the last 20 years. Where would we be now, right? Now, let's take that exercise and move it forward. In 20 years time, where do we wanna be? And where don't we wanna be? And this is a really critical question because as much as I love our young people and I have two daughters who are 18 and just gone to college, we can't put all of our, excuse me, all of our rubbish, all of our crap on their soldiers, right? We have had 18 years of the war on terror, 5.9 trillion dollars spent by the US on its own on these wars, these forever wars that start and never stop, right? We've had a 270% increase in jihadi groups. Over these years, we've had 197% increase just in the last two years of white right movements and hate groups in this country that are armed to the teeth. We actually don't have a choice, right? We've taken peace. Most of us have lived in Western countries where peace has been the norm for the last, since the end of World War II. And we've taken peace for granted. It's going back to your point about, you know, the men that are nonviolent are invisible. We take peace actors for granted. We can't take peace for granted anymore. It's like saying to Picasso, you're gonna give him paints and to paint the most fantastic masterpiece, but we're gonna give him a canvas that's completely shredded. We are shredding our own basic kind of foundations of the societies that we're living with because, and the societies out there because of the amount of weaponry that we're sort of dumping on the world. So I don't think we have a choice about what we do. And I think that when you look around and you look at how women on the ground have become the voice of peace in the world. They are the leaders of the peace movements. They're the leaders of the environmental movements. And they're doing it non-violently. Women are non-violent actors in the majority when they come together. We have to own that. We have to celebrate it. I love Mandela. I love Gandhi. But seriously, women historically have done this. Why are we not celebrating women's movements? So this is where we need to take the conversation. And enough is enough of saying it's culture, it's not. It's about power and they've screwed it up. And so we have to have a radical change in terms of thinking about who are actors and who has credibility to sit at the peace table or in these spaces. Thank you. Thank you all and have a lot to say. But I know that there are people in the audience who would like to make some comments or ask a question. I'd ask you to be very brief, stand up, introduce yourself and wait for the microphone. I see somebody up there and then maybe Amanda will get these two in the middle and then we'll come down to you. I'm gonna take all the questions at once for the sake of time. Thank you so much. My name is Evelyn Pauls. I'm from the Berco Foundation in Berlin in Germany and I'm working on a project on the long-term reintegration of female combatants. And I'm listening to you all. I still really hear this representation of women in conflict either as victims of conflict or as peace builders. And while I'm all in favor of elevating women's activism on peace, I wonder where are the other women that are involved in conflict? What I hear a lot from the women that I work with is that we don't really see ourselves in the women peace and security agenda, even though some of the work they do is very relevant to what you've all been talking about. So I wonder, should we, and if yes, how can we communicate this agenda better to those women? Thank you. Thank you so much. That's an excellent question. And now right here and then we move in. And I'm gonna just let my panel know that I'm not gonna ask you to answer every question. You pick one and come to it. Mark? Well, actually we're on live stream, so why don't we go to another person right now and we'll get this right in front. Here's one, okay. All right, we're running fast. Sorry, okay. First, I really salute the work that you're all doing on this important issue. It really is important getting the idea that we have to get women to the table is so ludicrous, but that's where we are. I've been doing some work on South Sudan and the statistics are incredibly gender specific about violence. So in terms of, in the most recent war, 8% of women have been killed. 8% of those killed are women and 82% of those killed are men. And so then it's 10% who are children and I think I'm guessing it's mostly boys who've been killed. And then when you turn to sexual violence in the war, as far as we know, it's as close to 100% girls and women as there is. I'm sure there are some boys, they'd ever report that, but it's so explicit in terms of gendered violence in kind of an extreme way. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that. And the other is I have to ask about youth peace and security as a member of the expert group on youth peace and security. It was very explicitly modeled on gender peace and security. What do you think about that? Great, thanks so much Mark. Then right here we have a question and we will get to both of your questions and then we'll go back to the panel. Thank you. Hi, I'm Nettra Halpern with Peace Films. I'm addressing this to Gary. I think your project of working with men is really critical. If you look at that the violent, okay, I'll give you an example. I was just interviewing children in Palestine that had been arrested and incarcerated by the IDF. I interviewed a seven year old and he said, I said, were you scared? And he said, oh no. And then the mother said, oh yeah, he wants to be the strong man. He wants to be the big man. And then I had child psychiatrists who said that that's part of the children. They know that the goal of the incarceration is to make them say ouch. And so they don't do it in defiance of that. But also regarding men and violence and glorification of violence, have you done any work with the US military and recruiting and the fact that the US military is recruiting in sporting events and giving that as a way to be a man and that I would say US foreign policy is pretty much male. I mean, the whole thing is let's bang them, let's bomb them and let's talk to them isn't part of it. So. Thank you. I'm gonna move the one, I think we have one mic. So our runner is going to be running. And I think that both the questions are right in the middle and we'll take both of them. Oh, we'll just move it. One, two, three. And then you're the last question. Go ahead. Hi, I'm Tucker from New Gen Peace Builders. Alex touched upon this, but with the youth being the future adults of society, what steps are being taken to involve and educate these youth in gender equality? Thank you. My name is Angie Yodermayna and I'm from Nairobi, Kenya where we do a lot of work on trauma-informed peace building. We're working with the Kenyan police who are 99.9% men and who are seen as the perpetrators and are driving our young people to join al-Shabaab and other people. I think your example in Kivu of working in a trauma-informed approach is our way we have to work as peace builders. If we don't start to heal those who hurt others, we will not help those who are hurt. Their transformation is our transformation. So thank you for your work. Thank you and right behind you. Thank you all for a great session. My name is Yalana Yavtich and I'm an assistant program coordinator for New Gen Peace Builders, but I'm originally from Serbia. My question is regarding UN resolution 1325. I have recently read a study that ever since the implementation of the resolution, women's presence in peace agreements as signatories has increased the durability of peace. And then of course, because I was curious about that, I read criticism on that study that women are typically sent to less grave conflict zones and that that particular study conclusion is now representative of actually, if women actually participate in the durability of peace. I was just wondering if you were aware of any additional studies that show that women's presence as signatories or in high positions actually does affect with the durability of peace or if it's too early to conclude something like that. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I'm going to ask each of you to say your concluding remark as well as answer one of the questions. Who would like to be first? Shontal, thank you. Just to start with the last question, there are actually quite some studies and I refer you to the big study that was done by the UN, the global study in, global study on the implementation of 1325 and you will find a lot of references there that will make that argument. In terms of, I want to maybe address the question of Mark. widespread use of gender-based violence is happening and everywhere and it's not happening just in conflict countries but elsewhere as well. And I think we have to realize that this is a symptom of gender inequalities and a symptom of the patriarchal systems that help this. In terms of the use, peace and security agenda, I am very worried that we're putting everybody in little boxes. So use is being put in the use, peace and security agenda. Women are put in the women, peace and security box and I think that's not very helpful. And particularly, I think for these two communities it's extremely important that they break through these silos that Bonnie talked about. Thank you very much. Who's up next? We can go right down. Okay, I'll say a couple of things. First of all, I agree foreign policy today does have much more of a stick lens and definitely not much more of a carrot. And that's why we have to change who's making policies and whose voices are integrated. I teach a course at Georgetown and one of the things I do is on global threats and I make sure that the classes have readings on women. And it's a way, my own personal way, my limited way of being able to bring somebody's perspective into the younger generation. And there's many ways but that's one way that I try to do that. And as far as who are the other women who are not in those categories, my perspective is that as I said, all women play a role in this. And so when I talk about things that are not typically thought about in this agenda, when I talk about food and water and climate change and things like that, it's to prevent war, it's to prevent conflict. A lot of these things, the lack of these things can lead to conflict. And then if you have conflict, who are the ones who are very often affected as women and who are the ones we wanna bring to the table are women. And so my perspective of the agenda is that encompasses a lot of different things that we hope to help to prevent the conflicts that we're talking about. So women play a role in so many parts of it, they may not be highlighted, but they do play that role. I'll comment on a couple of the questions that overlap. I think, Mark, to your example around those high rates of death among men we see in most conflicts around the world and those high rates of sexual violence against women we see in most, if not all, conflict zones around the world. I see in WPS not only the W and what it means for women, but also the gender, what that means. And so as we understand, gender is relational. So that WPS gives me a lens to see how it also plays out on the lives of young men and adult men, and not just that loss of life as how tragic that is for those men, but also the households led by women who have to pick up the pieces after men die in war. So I think if we take the women part of the peace and security agenda to also look at the relational aspect of gender, which is what we mean, but don't really act like we mean it much of the time. And I think the other point on some really good examples, both on trauma and how important it is and how long we know now in trauma studies how long trauma lasts. And I think that we continue to sort of do these four and five year program cycles as if somehow the impact of the wars in Yugoslavia, the wars in Eastern DRC and the list goes on, that somehow after a cycle of a UN peace mission that the trauma's gone. I think we've got to talk about that. And you highlighted very clearly the Palestinian example of how we just create a rite of passage under the kinds of oppression that we use against boys and young men in many parts of the world. And what I find is resilience and resistance when young men in many parts of the world, whether that's young men in rap and funk culture in Brazil or the US, reappropriate the symbols or the means that oppressive states have designed to oppress them. So there's resilience in that, but there's also a lot of danger. And I think you highlighted that. And absolutely yes, whoever brought up the example about how we recruit in the US. I was in West Virginia last weekend. You can see how the military goes directly to communities where young men don't have jobs working in coal mines and all the rest to say, we have a job for you. Now that's not to denigrate those who serve in the armed forces to question that, it says standing armies or otherwise, we're trying to recruit young unemployed men to go do harmful duty in many parts of the world. And that shame needs to be held up. Thanks for whoever brought that point up. Thank you. On the question of women combatants, actually Resolution 1325 has a specific reference to women combatants and what happens in their rehabilitation needs because they had been so ignored in the wars during the 1990s. I use the resolution as a way of getting to women combatants in Nepal and making sure that their needs were addressed, including the girls because at one point they wanted to put the girls in foster care. And we knew that that basically was slavery essentially. So it is there and it was an entry point for us to engage with the Maoists in Nepal at the time. It's also the entry point for talking about the women in the camps on the border of Turkey and dealing with Al-Shabaab right now with the violent extremism because it talks about women's rehabilitation needs. And we did a big report last that we published in January this year called Invisible Women, the Gendered Dimensions of Reintegration and Rehabilitation from Violent Extremism, where we lay out all the different things, the gaps in policy, the gaps, the problems with the police in Kenya that are involved in raping the women that they catch. So it's integral to that conversation and it's really important that people understand that it's there and they need to use it. The other part of this which is really important is that this agenda is about demonstrating women have agency regardless of where they are and what they're doing and that agency can be for positive use or for negative use. Violent extremist movements are now targeting and co-opting women, right? They're offering them equality and belonging and prestige and all sorts of things. All the things we talk about empowerment, they're effectively giving that message while on this side we're still failing, states are failing. So we have to think about that as well, that women are now seeing that they might have more opportunity with a violent armed group versus non-violence. So I think that's important to bear in mind. In terms of the research, I led a 15 country study 2002 to 2004 on how women make a difference, including in security sector reform and so on and so forth. It's in my book called Women Building Peace, but there are lots of case studies out there. There was a 2012 study that was a quantitative study on how women make a difference. 2018 study quantitatively that demonstrated that the real link is actually having strong women's movements that can continue the implementation process. And that's really critical because we're not really funding women's movements and they really need to be funded. On the youth question, how to engage youth? Last year for the first time at ICANN, we developed a women peace and security curriculum for Model UN. And if anybody does Model UN or is engaged in Model UN, please come to us because I think this is a really cool way of getting young kids to actually get involved and understand this. It was to think it was the first time in 18 years that it was actually on any Model UN program is quite something, but we're excited about that. I have to give the last minute to Alex. I think, there we go. So a few quick things to add. One is that on the issue that you raised also about communication, that is absolutely integral and it goes to the heart of why we're here today because even though this work has been going on for quite a long time, it's still work in progress. And so yes, there isn't any one dimension or even two dimensions to this issue. It really is much broader. And so we do need to figure out clearer ways of communicating this. To me, it's really about inspiring norms and inspiring systemic approaches. And so that will enable us really to instill greater gender equality, leverage everyone's capacities for peace and security. On the youth piece, I just wanted to add that right now we know that the majority of the population in developing in 48 of the least developed countries are youth. And so that requires us as a mandate to look very carefully at what the conditions are and exactly what you're saying, what kind of education is taking place. And so there are many different initiatives that are out there. And you can look at a lot of them either looking at through the UN and some of the youth peace and security initiatives, the UN and the ambassadors that exist, and USAID also in the Children in Adversity Initiative. Last thing I would just say is I was glad to hear a question from a foundation. All of this does require funding, although much of this is how we approach an issue and integrating it into the work we do. It is also about training capacity and so much more and changing the way we do things. And so with that, I really compliment those foundations that have invested our secure future, Humanity United, Compton in the past has as well. Much more needs to be done and governments need to step up and really make this an integral part of their budgets. Yes. One final, I hope that you will all follow the work of the US Civil Society Working Group. We have a Twitter handle as well as a website. And our website you can find on the USIP website. There's also a lot of informational material. So please go and visit our website. Thank you for that. And bringing it to a close, I want you to join me in thanking this wonderful panel. And I hope whoever you're talking to today, you might be able to take a few of these stories and share what women peace and security means in the way forward. Thank you all.