 titled, titled, where are the women, how conflict security and development shape gender inequality and vice versa. I'm Emma, and I am a master's student at King's College London in the worst-case apartment, and I also have a bachelor's from politics in politics from University of Edinburgh. And I'm particularly interested in issues around cyber security, political philosophy and gender, which is the topic for today. The inspiration for the panel today or for the discussion today. The question, where are the women actually comes from a feminist scholar called Cynthia Enlow, who says that by paying attention specifically to the roles women play in international relations, and in politics around the world, really tells us a lot about the broader power dynamics that play and the structures that play in international politics. So she wants to use this kind of narrow starting point of looking at the women specifically to learn more about gender. And we will be discussing gender inequality now since the UN Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, but still gender inequality is a massive issue that we still need to tackle. In fact, Security Council report from this year says that women are still disproportionately impacted by war and conflict. This was exacerbated by the pandemic with spiking violence, eroded access to services, and also eroded legal protections. And they're actually calling for a paradigm shift after the pandemic and how resources are distributed. So we still have a lot of challenges ahead of us. And we'll discuss all of this today with this wonderful panel. The panelists are from quite diverse research backgrounds, and they have so much great experience in these and related topics. First that we have Dr very unique to do it, who is a senior advisor at the Berghoff Foundation, and she has managed multiple research projects on resistance and liberation movements negotiations and asymmetric conflicts, inclusive civil and security transitions and post war governance and civil resistance. And she's also can, she also conducts policy advice and training sessions for conflict and peace building seminars. And then we have Dr, we know okay, who is a Kenyan academic based at the Center for Gender Studies at so as in London, and in her own words, her research lies at the nexus between gender sexuality, security, and nation state projects as they occur in conflict and post conflict societies. And she has experience working in development sector, supporting women's rights organizations across different African regions. And then we have Claire Duncanson. She is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Edinburgh, where her work focuses on women's women, peace and security, gender in the military and gender and peace building. And she is currently working to bring a feminist analysis to the political economy of building peace. And Dr. Duncanson is also working with Carol Coon on the feminist roadmap for sustainable peace at the moment. And last, but certainly not least, we have Dr Christine Chang, who is a senior lecturer in work studies at King's College London, and her research focuses on conflict economies, peace building and peacekeeping, transitional justice, gender and politics. She's worked with the UN and the World Bank. So in preparation for the panel today, I asked all the panelists to prepare an answer to a specific question, which was, where are women and conflict security and development, and why should we care. So I will give the word to them very soon. And afterwards, each of the panelists, after each of the panelists have spoken, we will open up to questions, but you can submit questions already through the Q&A chat. And just so everyone knows the session today is being recorded. So without further ado, we can start the session with Veronique. Great. Many thanks, Emma. I hope everyone can hear me well. Thank you so much for the invite and I'm very grateful to be here virtually with all of you, wherever you're calling from. And for my initial input as well as for my contribution to this panel, I will say my focus will be quite specifically on what I would define as women at the forefront, or sometimes at the back end of protest resistance and liberation struggles, given the aspirations and experiences that these women represent. And as I would say, undervalued agents of change as an untapped resource for peace building and development. And I'll try to argue that by either ignoring these women or perceiving their roles through traditional gender lenses. The international community and specifically peace building agencies in our urgently reinforced gender inequality, replicate prevailing unequal power structures, both when it comes to that contributions during peace processes but also their inclusion in politics and more in society. And so I'll make the case that a shift of perception and narrative is required from perceiving those women as security threats or as invisible players or as passive recipients of aid, choosing them as human security agents and peace building stakeholders and therefore how it's important to translate that conflict agency into peace building and development agency. And those reflections are derived, I would say, not so much from academic research but more from my past and my ongoing engagement and participatory action research with women involved in a number of opposition opposition groups, whom we are considering peace processes and possible transitions. And if I have time, maybe not in my initial input but in the general discussion I would also add some comparative observations on the roles and agency of women within nonviolent protest movements who seem to have become much more visible, at least in the eyes of the media in recent protests around the globe. So where are women in conflict to this question I would answer that from the perspective that I'm bringing today, women play a variety of roles in struggles for democracy for dignity for human rights, including gender rights, both through armed and unarmed activism. But these roles are often undervalued, taken for granted by their male counterparts by their communities, and also as I said by international peace building agencies. I'll just give the example of the international standards on DDR on the disarmament demobilization and reintegration of armed groups. The UN has recently upgraded their DDR policy, including on gender responsive approaches to DDR. And in doing so they have developed a more nuanced understanding of what are women's roles in conflict. In order to broaden eligibility criteria for DDR programs. According to the new international DDR standards women can benefit from reintegration assistance, if they have taken part in armed groups as active combatants carrying weapons, or as dependence relatives of male combatants and financially or socially dependent women, or as supporters by participating in the conflict through forced or voluntary support roles such as cooks porters messengers administrators cleaners nurses spies sex workers and so on. I would say on the one hand this is a welcome recognition that our movements are not only made up of the guys with the guns. But on the other hand the characterization of social and political roles by women activists as support functions, somehow contributes to dismissing them as secondary players. In my own work I have interacted with many powerful women from the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, Kurdistan, Columbia, Mali, all of whom joined our movements partly out of personal reasons protection or sometimes even revenge, but largely largely for political and social motivations, including gender related aspirations for equality and for emancipation. And I found that research shows that groups that have a substantive participation of women actually tend to have more gender equal goals, less misogynistic socialization practices and stronger norms against sexual violence resulting in less wartime rape. I heard from a leading political activists from an armed separatist movement that is now undergoing DDR in Mali, and, quoting her, women have not taken up arms but they are next to the men who took up arms. We are the ones who bring food, we are the ones who try to stabilize them, who bring them on the path to peace. I also met many activists from women's wings of national liberation armies, for instance in actually Indonesia and in Mindanao in the Philippines. In the case of actually there was a women's battalion that was comprised of up to 1000 women who were active in logistics, medical intelligence support, few of them carried weapons but they underwent combat training. And despite the significance of their contributions to the struggle of the free action movement, none of them were invited to take part in peace negotiations. The court in 2005 doesn't mention them and the movement even failed to acknowledge their very existence when they registered male combatants to benefit from DDR accompaniment and reintegration. These women ended up creating their own self-led structure called the Women's League in Achi, Lina, in order to train themselves to learn new skills and to transition from wartime activism to civil society activism and more rarely to political careers. We have seen a similar story unfolding more recently in Mindanao in the wake of the 2014 Peace Accord, where the former women's brigade within the armed forces of the MILF was comprised of several thousand female militants who were there to ensure the safety of the combatants by attending to the medical and other basic needs but also serving as a reserve force. These women were not selected for the ongoing DDR process and they selected, they decided to take the future into their own hands here as well. And my colleagues and I are supporting them in creating their own post-war association to support those members in setting up local community projects and to guarantee in their own words that this current marginalization of BWAP, the women's battalion stops, and that we stand next to the men and not behind the men. So this leads me to the question finally of why should we care and how does this matter for peace building, for security and for development. Well, I would say that if these women are not taken seriously during conflict, they risk facing many forms of marginalization in peacetime, marginalization by their own movement, not giving them equal access to positions, to benefits, to economic livelihood, marginalization by society due to stigmas as former combatants but also for having trespass cultural and social norms around intercast marriage for instance in the case of Nepal. But also finally marginalization by the international community, but by not inviting them to the negotiation table and later by focusing efforts on exclusively civil society initiatives, while these women don't need to fit any categories for reconstruction and programming. So I'll end by saying that what I think is needed for this to change is on the one hand, a better understanding of the nuanced and intersectional identities of women activists in conflicts. Their sources of marginalization, the different risks and challenges they face during transitions, their needs and their aspirations for themselves and their communities. It also requires a change of mindset that I've described at the beginning from security threats to seeing women as security providers actually and as I would say allies in the fight for changing gender norms in society and bringing about emancipatory approaches to DDR and to politics and finally it requires a holistic understanding of what forms of support are needed and welcome along the different pillars of UN 1325 participation, protection, promotion and prevention. I don't have time to go more into the type of work that we do to address those needs but I hope I'll have time to return to that in the Q&A session. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was a great opening remark for the session. And I definitely have a lot of questions that I would love to get into in the Q&A afterwards. Now I will hand over to Dr. O'Ketch who will speak next. Thank you. Thank you very much Emma for the invitation to join you this morning. Thank you Dr. Veronique. I think there's nothing much more to add other than what she has already framed out for us as some of the sort of key issues that respond to the question that you set for us. But let me offer four big points and the first one would be to say of course the women are there. If you're looking for them you're going to find them. And then under any rocks or crevices they're right there in front of you. And so perhaps the question we should be asking ourselves is what is it about women's experiences of conflict peace building and our understanding of the world that makes people a bit uncomfortable that we still continue to ask the questions around why we must center their experiences and why we must center their voices. So that's one element of it. The second bit would be to ask what is it about gender as an analytical framework and feminist theories and the standings of power where power sits, how power circulates in society, the ways it morphs over time that makes us uncomfortable, that leads to a continued marginalization of both that kind of scholarship, but also of the movements and the intellectuals that have been shaping a lot of our thinking in relation to power as a construct, the way in which gender as a construct social construct in and of itself also reproduces particular forms of power hierarchies in our societies. So that's the first big point. The second one is to underscore for those in the room who might also be asking where are the women and asking that in a genuine way. It reminds us that when we talk about policy frameworks such as 1325 and the series of other UN security resolutions that have come out and questions of peace and security. When you think about the African Union and the Maputa protocol for women, for instance, and either iterations of gender policies across different parts of the globe. There are policies that were developed out of the goodwill of governments. It's not because some president or groups of ministers sat somewhere one day and thought oh my goodness how wonderful. Would it be great if we centered women's experiences more. Wouldn't it be great if you thought about gender equality, but these are products of the work of feminist movements. It's 1825 and its emergence on the floor of the United Nations is a direct product of the activism of the decades much like CEDA or much like Beijing plus the Beijing framework. Other products of women's movements organizing and people tend to forget that because when it gets claimed by institutions and gets articulated as a policy framework we forget the energies that have actually been behind. We're centering these questions within international bodies, such as the United Nations and their subsequent cascading into amongst member states. But I think there's an important point to remember here which is around the radical visions that are often represented by women's movements feminist movements in trying to push for the entrenchment of ideas around equality and redistribution of power. This happens when you when you turn a radical vision for freedom and justice into a policy framework. And this is what we have seen in 1325 and other policy frameworks that these are documents that then become subject to massive negotiation amongst member states and the sort of utility of arguments around culture, national sovereignty, societal differences, become the entry points for member states and different actors to begin to strip away at the radical potential of this policy framework. We tend to end up with arguments around participation, prevention, you know the three P's or key pillars around policy frameworks, yet, as we all know as both feminist scholars or activists, the people who embody a lot of the experiences that are being talked about in this policies. The key element that we're looking for in any radical shifts in our society is a sort of a structural rethinking of how we organize our societies, and that what we do with prevention participation are simply entry points to that radical shift. It's easy to sort of confuse the tactic with the end goal. The end goal really is not for me to have more women in parliament. The end goal isn't for us to have more women participating in peace talks. The end goal really is to have an environment in which we think about conflict transformation in ways that is not deeply reliant on violence. We think about conflict and the resolution of conflict in ways that is not heavily reliant on violence used to discipline women in societies and to use women's bodies as the sort of site for that disciplinary mechanism for how we understand the reorganization of societies. So if we must talk about participation of women as a way to help us talk about changing how we think about power in society, yes, but participation is not really what we're after. What we are after is that through that participation, we can have real conversation about patriarchy misogyny and power inequalities in our societies. And because we are talking about power to return to your central question of where are the women, and we can think about this in relation to racial justice, we can think about it in relation to the intergenerational questions such as youth. The central argument around participation the central argument around the visibility of particular groups of people in the room is that power does not seed space people who hold power do not seed space easily. So why we continue to wrestle with what with the participation of women with the visibility of women with the experiences of women being critical to how we rethink our societies, because power does not seed space. And so the fundamental challenge that we are we are facing around questions of inequalities, whether they are mobilized around the axis of gender or race or class is fundamentally a question of power. What we need to deal with inequalities is to deal with power in our societies. And that is why we will continue to have these conversations, because while we make 10 or 15 steps forward, in terms of how power has conceded. So we can think about it for instance in relation to education of girls. I know many of you in the room would be, you know, shop that there's a time people are negotiating whether girls should go to school. So we take some of these things for granted today. But that is power conceding space and saying okay fine. If you think this education thing is the most radical idea in the world will give you education. But we are going to claw that back in certain ways how will we claw it back will claw it back in the ways in which women will continue to not feel safe in public streets. So go and get all the degrees you want to go and get all the jobs you want, but we will still continue to remind you about your second class citizenship through weak norms in our society that regulate violence, through the targeted violence that you as a woman will continue to experience. You want to degree sure go and get it but we will claw that back through poor labor practices in the workplace by ensuring an equal pay for you in relation to others who are male, who are men in the society who are still doing the same kind of job. So I think what we must all remember as as as younger scholars in the room or activists in the room is that we're consistently wrestling and navigating and negotiating with systems of power in our society. And what we must be alive to is how power shifts and mobs, and that we should keep our eye on the target. And that's target is to think 10 steps ahead in terms of what is the next strategy that systems and institutions in our countries in our society is using laws using policies using conflict in and of themselves are going to be the avenue through which to claw back these things that we name as as as as indicators of equality in our society. And we have seen that next phase of the shifts in power through the discusses around for instance gender ideology that are circulating prominently across the global north. The idea that the very basic things that Veronica set out for us here today, women as agents, the scholarship of feminists that gave us the terminology and the language of gender and gender as an analytical framework, the feminist scholarship that allowed us to understand this system of power called patriarchy and understand misogyny. Now we are being told this is not scientific knowledge. This is not scholarship worthy of any merits. So gender studies centers are being closed all over the place. Feminists activists and movements are being closed all over the space that is a tactic of power. That is a tactic of a system and a structure that is seeing the sort of gains to use that language that has been made in trying to shift how we think about gender relations in our society, how we think about power relations, and the strategy therefore is to begin to delegitimize the frameworks the thought leadership and the intellectual knowledge that has gotten us to that place. And what should be more worrying and should be more worrying for all of us is the organ the organized forces around this. So you're not talking about two or three random people on social media, you know, who jump on to particular debates and therefore spend enough energy, you know, trying to harass women out of social media spaces, but you're talking about organized religion. Organized political parties. You're talking about organized pressure groups with sufficient financial resources to mobilize global campaigns to occupy spaces within the United Nations, and other bilateral spaces with the express intention of shifting the discusses in those space with express intention of influencing the discourse in that space. So when you see Trump in the last era beginning to say we need to replace the language of gender in documents and replace it with women. Now for people who think that is about trans identity actually you have missed the point, because to continue to fall to say we're going to remove gender, and we're going to focus on women is to simply urge an essentialist interpretation of what it is that feminists have been talking about. This is not simply about replacing men with women. This is not simply about replacing girls with boys, but it's about interrogating the power systems that make it critical for us to argue for women's voices and girls voices to be to be central so to take away gender is to take away a power analysis. You're very invested in doing trans exclusionary work, you're going to celebrate that as a gain, while in effect what you have lost is the analytical framework that allowed us to make particular demands around equality in many of these spaces. So let's keep our sight on the organized political parties across Europe across North America and other parts of the world, and how they're actively mobilizing other political forces in the global south and in the majority world against and around this specific issues. And we saw this in places such as Uganda, for instance, where you had evangelists coming in from the US to go and mobilize members of parliament in Uganda to end up putting in place an anti homosexuality bill with adult penalty. And that is the sort of connections that you're seeing, the global connections that you're seeing around this, these movements. The final point that I wanted to make is linked to the question of scholarship and the marginalization of scholarship, and I've already alluded to it through the sort of discusses around gender ideology and how that is therefore also targeting gender studies feminist studies and feminist generally. But what we must also ask of our colleagues in our departments, whether they're in the political science international relations or conflict and peace studies is the continued marginalization of feminist scholarship as modes of thinking that are critical to reengineering concepts that shape how international institutions and policy institutions think about the interventions. Now there have been two recent studies that have sort of lifted up this idea of marginalization and given it a face through numbers. So an article by a piece, Medi and Alice Khan that was looking at the sort of publication numbers of women from the global south in particular feminist scholarship and feminist scholars from the global north in well known international journals. And there's another piece by a Diego K with the African Leadership Center that was tracing being a tracing study of scholarship peace scholarship across the African continent for over, I think, two decades. Now these two pieces of literature and and and and research lift up to central arguments. The first is that even where you have feminist scholarship in international journals, journals that have a global reach. We still continue to see the marginalization of scholars from the global south, which therefore means you're only always only going to get a partial narrative and a partial understanding of the world. If you still continue to only center particular voices over others. So there's work to be done there, even just in terms of the basic access and the and the breadth of views that we could be listening to and thinking with as part of our own processes of asking the question, where the women and why do we care and why does gender matter. The second element to that is the, the still so even when you have feminist scholars who might not be from the global south or feminist scholars who are from the global south but are located in the global north publishing. You still continue to see the absence in our reading lists, or in the engagement by our own colleagues with our scholarship. So feminist scholarship still continues to remain on the periphery of how scholars are thinking about some of the major questions of our time. And so the question of where the women is also a direct question of the marginalization of the theories, the frameworks that allow us to effectively answer that question. If the lenses through which we continue to interrogate conflict and peace building continue to be gender neutral lenses, lenses that imagine that gender is not an important analytical framework to understand some of these central questions. So let me stop there and I can pick up some of the questions later. Great. Thank you that was a great speech, especially this around a scholarship is something I thought about a lot. And something that we really need to change we want to see more female academics, for sure. And next up is Dr clear Duncanson. Thank you Emma and thank you for inviting me. And, you know, that was, it's hard to follow these two presentations I was so gripped by those I almost forgot that I was about to speak next, and really really good introductions. Thank I mean, we've come a long way I think in some ways since Cynthia and will first asked the question, where are the women, and, you know, three over three decades ago. We're having in those early days to have to make the case that gender matters and conflict security and development, and both in the sense that the lives of women and girls matter as victims of security and development policies and, as, I don't need to make so clear as key actors in security and development. And, you know, the second point that gender matters, which we know has really brought to the fore the idea of gender as a symbolic system, influencing which behaviors and actions and policies are respected in public life and which are not. Now I would say feminists and gender scholars are a huge part of the security studies community. And so, as it's very much the case as I mean I pointed out that there is still considerable trouble getting hurt. There's an abundance of awesome scholarship huge sections in the International Studies Association, etc. And the reason for which it makes the question you asked us Emma quite hard to answer, where are the women because they're they're everywhere as the previous speakers have have made clear they're everywhere in conflict security and development on the ground and in scholarship, and the reasons why we should care are innumerable. And I'd like to focus on today, and so it's not to repeat the things that my colleagues have already said is the particular moment that we're in right now. I don't think we're in the same place as we were in the early days of feminist security scholarship. We've a much harder deadline if you like than ever before. We face too well many but to in particular massive and intertwined crises and inequalities crisis and an ecological crisis that really shape the conflict security and development terrain. So, Oxfam noted in 2020 that the world's 2000 or so billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60% of the planet's population. People inequality is gendered. So Oxfam's report shows that it's a wealthy elite that accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of ordinary people and particularly women and girls. So the 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa. Equality has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic Oxfam's 2021 report noted that took just nine months for the top 1000 billionaires fortunes to return to their pre pandemic highs. But for the world's poorest people recovery could take 14 times longer. Women are overrepresented in the sectors of the economy that are hardest hit by the pandemic. So global inequality is shockingly entrenched, it's gendered, and it's getting worse. At the same time we face a devastating ecological crisis. So we all know this, but the last five years have been the hottest ever recorded ice caps are melting permafrost and the Arctic is throwing 70 years ahead of projections. But it's melting three times as fast as a decade ago. So ocean levels are rising quicker than expected putting coastal towns and cities at risk. And let's not forget the more than two thirds of the world's mega cities are located by the sea. Also as the UN Secretary General points out, while the oceans are rising, they are also being poisoned. Moreover, as the planet burns, a million species in the world's ecosystem are in near term damage of extinction. So it's important to note that inequalities and environmental degradation have been around since the start of feminist security scholarship. They've always been there, they've always been urgent, and they've always been in the minds of feminist feminists have attempted to not put hard and fast barriers around what counts as a security issue, but recognize the economic injustice and an environmental degradation are also part of what it means to be to talk about security. So they've always been urgent, but I think today it's of a different order. We have only 10 years in which to transform our economic, social and political systems to orient them away from driving these crises and towards promoting genuine security, human and planetary flourishing. So I think that's also echoes some of the things that we know was saying about them, that our goal can't just be participation as an end goal but it's participation for a further goal and that's the transformation of society. And feminist and gender analysis of important things to say about these twin crises in a way I think that sometimes it hasn't always been picked up in the, and the domains of the women peace security agenda at the United Nations. Arguably without feminism we cannot fully explain the drivers of inequalities and insecurities and of the ecological crises. The crucial claim that feminists make is not so much, you know men dominate corporations that in their quest for profit drive the inequalities and climate change or, or men dominate militaries that fuel insecurity and equality and environmental destruction, both to some extent, that is true men do dominate those institutions. But for feminists, it's less often a point about what men do, and more often the point that that the ideas traits and practices that are associated with masculinity, competitiveness, ruthlessness, that man is apart from and superior to nature. Those ideas are valorized in white Western cultures, and this enables the systems of extractivist capitalism and militarism that are driving inequalities and ecological collapse to seem superior to seem natural to seem beyond question. So, and we can only perhaps explain the dismissal of alternatives, sharing and circular economies, the kinds of regenerative agriculture and forestry practiced by rural and indigenous people, peaceful cooperative international relations. We can only explain the dismissal of those by noting the way that they are associated with the feminine, the devalued discredited deal legitimized. And I, to me it's so important to have women's yes but particularly feminist analyses in conflict security and development. It's feminist analyses that expose the underlying subtle but powerful ways in which gender operates as a symbolic system, legitimizing some approaches and policies, discrediting others, and preventing us so far from creating the societies where people are secure and conflict. Thank you very much. That was great. I am pleasantly surprised that many of you have talked about talked about climate change and how that interlinks here and we also have a panel coming up on climate change later today. And as you rightly point out this, all these issues really do interlink. And now we have our final panelist for today. Dr Christine Chang. Hi everyone first of all thank you so much Emma for inviting me thank you to the organizers for the amazing job that you've done. I heard last night's panel went really really well. And I am absolutely stoked to come after these three amazing speakers they've just provided so much food for thought for me. And I want to try and weave together some of the things that have been said previously with what I'm going to talk about today in terms of norms of violence and thinking about that. And I've been obsessed with this for a long time. But I haven't quite known what to do about it, and how to deal with this in part because there's a difference between being a feminist and being somebody does this conflict which is what I do. But also actually merging these two realms together and I thought, for a long time like why am I not actually studying more of that intersection. And it's funny because some of you might know Marsha at the at the LSE who does a lot of this kind of scholarship and she asked that in a keynote a few years ago at a conference and it really made me think about it. And I think now I'm at a place where, as Clara said there's been so much change that it's easier now to talk about some of these issues in a way that I think we would have been marginalized, we were marginalized and trying to raise these issues about 10 15 years ago, and I'm really delighted by the fact that the space is open now in a way that is never been. So, let me just put my remarks in that context. The thing that I want to talk to you today about is experiences of violence, and then thinking about the transformational aspects of this in the, in the way that we know was kind of bringing up earlier, and the power dynamics in particular. So I'm going to link together a few different ideas and I'm going to share my screen with you, and they'll seem a little bit disparate at first I sort of have to piece it together for you. But I hope you'll see where I'm going with this I'm going to try and share my screen with you it's got a few, a few different thoughts for you. Okay. So, Emma, can you see, can you see my screen. Yeah, all good. Okay, all good. I am just going to try and start my slideshow, which is being covered up by everything. Okay, is that good. Yeah, yeah, that's great. Great. And so I wanted to talk first to you about some really fascinating research that has come out of the health area. And this has to do with adverse childhood experiences and just follow along with me because I will take you through a story that I think makes sense in terms of norms of violence and what this looks like in conflict and why it matters so much in terms of gender in particular and, and how we construct power in society. So, this is work that is looked at the health field and thinking about traumas and abuses in the home and this is coming from OECD countries most of the research was actually done in the US it originated in the US from an insurance company that was trying to save money and then was interested in obesity. When they looked at the factors around that drove obesity what they found was that the core link was actually around what they call adverse childhood experiences. These are basically childhood traumas. And so you can see this list, I mean they have a very short questionnaire if you want to take a look at it, and people that have experienced different kinds of aces. So, either physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse at home, neglect, household dysfunction. If you experience even one of those, your probability for getting sick, self harm, suicide, all sorts of horrible diseases, you know, heart attacks, cancer, everything else, highly, highly correlated. And this was a real shocker in the health field. They just, people didn't recognize the link between those kinds of traumas in the home and long term physical outcomes, as well as obviously mental health outcomes. If you take a look at this work, it is absolutely mind blowing. And I'm sorry about the blurry image but this is just to say that, you know, then your risk increases substantially and you can see that a lot of those things that I talked to you about before go together. Right. So, if you've experienced a lot of physical violence or sexual violence in your life, then those other things are probably also more likely to happen. And you can see you can't quite see sort of the blurriness here but the impacts on mental health have to do with everything from suicide and those horrible health impacts to just how you behave normally in your day to day life. Now, I want you to think about those kinds of impacts in terms of what it looks like in a rich country, like the US that has all of the support systems. And then think about the traumas that people have gone through in terms of physical abuse, physical violence, seeing violence, having your parents taken away from you. Now, take that image and think about, what does this look like in a conflict setting? What happens when people being displaced have seen so much violence or violence is basically normalized? Okay, so that's, that's piece one. So keep that in the back of your mind. Piece two is thinking just about what norms of violence look like and particularly intimate partner violence. This is just giving you a number. If you focus on that red highlighted bit, how many people in various countries around the world and this is taken from some amazing work done by Charlotte Watts, Mary Ellsberg and the team that did this multi-country WHO study that is absolutely mind blowing. But take that row in the physical or sexual violence column and how many people have experienced that. So this is just, these are not, these are not conflict affected places. These are just, you know, developing comparative developing country places that so you get a sense of what those numbers are like. And they are pretty stark. So these are people that have ever experienced sexual or physical violence. And the row before that is currently, right, in the past 12 months. Those are some pretty stark numbers. And you can see that a little bit more starkly. So the number in black is what you should focus on. And that just tells you in the past 12 months in these countries, you know, what are those prevalence rates like in terms of intimate partner violence. And they're really high. And I want to take you now so that that was taken from this bit of work and I, this is one of my favorite pieces of work ever in terms of a really mind blowing change your ideas about how the world works kind of research. And this is, this is some follow up work for Mary Ellsberg where she presented a few weeks ago at a seminar that I had the pleasure of sitting on the panel with her on. And I found some things here that were, you know, obviously shocking it's a follow up to the work that has been done earlier, but I wanted to raise around norms of violence and experiences of violence, and sort of what people have been through. And then thinking about the aces discussion that I gave to you earlier. And thinking about the attacks that people have been through the kinds of violence right so experienced any tax on their village attacked in this crisis this is taken from the South Sudan context, thinking about intercommunal raids abducted being beaten physical violence, sexual violence, and who these perpetrators were right so you know this is coming from all over the place, you can see that those numbers are shockingly high. Like in terms of long term outcomes for society, given what we know actually just about OECD context where there are the supports to be able to try and manage them. What happens when there are no supports. Thanks Emma. And thinking about this, right. This looks at if you look now at where the sexual violence occurred doing the crisis and who has perpetrated what. It really, you know, how many people have experienced attempts at rape or actual rape. These numbers are really, really high in a place like South Sudan and will be high in lots of different places that have been affected by conflict. And here I want to get to this crux of norms of violence right what makes it acceptable for people to, to say yeah this is this is okay and thinking about that power dynamic right the thing that. So, and very unique we're talking about in terms of what is acceptable where does the empowerment come from. And if you look at those statements these are women agreeing with these statements. Right so what percentage of women agree that is a wife's obligation to have sex with her husband whenever he wants it, and so on and so forth right and there's a high level of agreement from the women. This is not coming from the men. This is coming from the women about their own expectations about what is acceptable in their lives in terms of violence that is perpetrated to them. Sexual violence that is perpetrated to them by their own intimate partners. And how does that then affect how the construct of power relations sits in your entire society. I think that if people think this is okay, right so just, you know, looking at this particular statement, over 90% of women from room back agreed that men have a right to beat their wives for at least one reason. 75% agreed that he could be justified for three or four reasons, right, including things like neglecting the children or arguing with their husband or in another survey I've seen burning the dinner. So, I mean this is to say that there's quite, there's quite a lot here that has to do with the construct of how people relate to each other and what people think of as being socially acceptable in terms of what you can do to one another and how gender is constructed within that hierarchy but also what that looks like then in how you cope in the aftermath of war when people have had all of these terrible terrible experiences, but don't have any of the support structures or the funding or, you know, any way of actually being able to cope with that what does a society to and then how do you change those norms of violence in a way that allows for that kind of transformation and gender equality that we're all hoping for and how do we we work and transform society in those ways. I don't think we have great answers to these things I really don't think we even have a baseline on a lot of this stuff. So, those are the things that I'm thinking about and working on. Thanks very much. It's great to have these really jarring statistics to kind of round out the initial part of this discussion today. We're now moving on to the Q&A part, which is a bit more informal everyone who wants to submit a question can do that through the Q&A function below. Great ones already. I'm going to kind of selfishly start with one of my own questions and one that I've been debating a lot in kind of my time as a student and particularly working through kind of feminist and gender theory issues. And, you know, before this panel I asked you all to prepare something on the question where are the women in conflict security and development. And I do find that there's a frustrating tendency that when we talk about gender and international relations we talk about women's issues and we assume that that has to do with women only, and that men almost aren't gendered in the same way. So, my question to you guys are, are we right to focus more on women? Should we focus more on men and masculinities or, you know, gender just a social construct and we should kind of just focus on gender as it is. I would love to hear all your thoughts. Claire, maybe you want to start. Thanks Emma. Yeah, I think it's important to remember I think that when Cynthia Enlow first asked the question she always meant it as a route to asking. She said, you know, one of the things that it makes you do when you ask whether the women is it then makes men visible as men as well and then it then gets you thinking about gender relations, the power relationships that Alvino brought to the floor. And it makes you start thinking about why is it that men and women are in these positions and brings in the idea of gendered ideas about masculinity. So I think it was never meant to be a claim that feminists should just look at where women are and what they're doing. It was always a starting point for those deeper reflections. And I think it's absolutely imperative that it is used in that way. We have to look at men and masculinity and we have to keep thinking about the things I was talking about the way that gender operates in that symbolic way to make really problematic structures and systems. We have to make extractivist capitalism like militarism, how it operates to make those systems seem like the superior ways of going about things the natural ways of going about things that's me the really powerful contribution of feminism, but I don't. I don't get angry about the question where are the women because it's a good routine. Thank you. Alvino do you have any contributions. I agree with what Claire has already started us off with. I could also say that, from an activist perspective, I think it remains important to sort of do this focus on women as a constituency. There's value in specific contexts for singling that out. And to do that in ways that does not necessarily do complicated work around gender relations because in that moment you're thinking about women as survivors of violence as women who are having very specific experiences and you're trying to respond to needs. I say this, I make this point about women as a constituency and a sort of instrumentalized approach to it to address the question of that somebody raised in the Q&A about the participation of women and persuading people to get their participation. The problem is not about getting people to participate is what happens when they participate. And this is where the feminist thing comes in right so it's not just about a body in the room, but is what sets of ideas you're hoping that that body in the room is going to be offering in relation to a series of questions that are put before them. I think there has been a vast growth of scholarship and masculinities, which has done the very work that you're pointing to, which is to argue that you cannot think about women's experiences outside of the sort of relational experiences they have with others in the society. So it's not either or, one can make tactical choices around when to do certain things particularly from an activist perspective, but from an intellectual perspective, it's never either or. And I think often folks who make the decision to read agenda as women, they're just being lazy. So that is a great way to remind ourselves that we really need to think critically when we think about feminism. I have a question which I think maybe very unique would be well placed to answer because you've focused, you've kind of gotten your hands dirty and really worked with conflict resolution in many ways. We have a question from Leslie here about how can it be ensured in any future post conflict situation that women who were involved also are subject to DDR which is shorthand for disarmament demobilization and reintegration. As is their right. Does the UN or some other body have to automatically organize a system with officials tasked to ensure women in conflict to get their DDR. And thanks for the question. Before I answer that maybe briefly on the question of the men, because that's that's one way that we keep encountering in our work so here again coming more from a practitioner or trainers perspective where in the work that we do with the women the types of women that are just described I think we started from a perspective of it's about giving those women the right skills and capacity and confidence and knowledge. And then they'll be in those spaces where where they're not yet and I think like over time we've realized that actually yeah I mean like those skills and those capacities and that confidence is not enough. If the structures that have just been described by my company is not changed and so we've now moved to a position of okay we really have to bring the men in those conversations make them allies make them understand the importance of the work that that is being done with those women. And I think when it's a sad reality but when when the message around gender equality around participation and around transformation comes from main main leaders then. Fortunately that's as I said the reality that message is more likely to be taken seriously you know so having some of those male individuals like bringing those messages is definitely key and and that's where that's where we're trying to advance now in that work. On the UN or the international community and and changing norms and standards and procedures around DDR I mean I think this yeah there's different ways that this can be done I think the first step is really to help the international community to gain access to those women that have described that they tend to be unfortunately hidden hard to reach they are hidden behind all of these military structures. There's the language barriers you know many of those women are marginalized and are not as educated as as the men. They tend to be in remote locations that I had to access. They tend to mistrust outsiders they have much less exposure to outsiders than than than the men have and so first like what what has to be done is is to grant in that access. Then it's also getting exposed to their messages and to hear to make them visible to hear what they have to say and so for instance when my colleagues we've done some action research with a former female combatants giving them a voice with with produced a film that I can also put in the chat. Later on that it's called I have to speak where we asked women representing various experiences in conflict as combatants and as many other roles play that they play in conflict to talk about their you know the challenges their face. What happens to them as as as women in those struggles what aspirations do they have what happened out of that. And so yeah like bringing using technology and other means to bring these messages across are very important. What the UN is doing with with having much more inclusive ways of defining combatants defining individuals that can go through integration support is really good. Another method that is being used by the UN for instance is by using what they call community violence reduction programs which are enabling international stuff to kind of go into communities and to and to provide support or inclusively so that those women that are not either not being allowed or put forward for foster programming or that might have because of trauma because because of other reasons are not coming forward that you know they can also be helped and assisted so that's that's an interesting idea. And yeah I would have many things to say but maybe I'll pass on. And Dr Chang I know that you've written a book about extra Leo groups in post conflict Liberia. And in your conclusion, you said that the this relied on the presence of both a physical and a social project. So kind of going off of whatever Nika's been talking about about the post conflict transition, where are, where is the gender in this transition in Liberia. And I mean with respect to, I have to say part of part of what stimulated my thinking around the thing that I just presented was seeing so many things on the ground that were really different from my own experiences of gender equality. And the fact that there was quite a lot of sort of day to day regular violence in people's lives that I just wasn't. I think I was kind of shocked by when I was, you know, when I spent time there. And it made me think about, well, is it normal like how there was a lot of sexual violence going on, but it was just going to sound terrible but it sounded very regularized and normalized and in a way that people were very accepting is the wrong word but I was really shocked by how people just, you know, dealt with as if this is this is to be expected. And that really, that really floored me and I could see it in all sorts of ways in terms of how people talked about it talked about their experiences of it talked about how they would hit their children like there was all sorts of just norms of behavior that were really surprising to me and and not they shouldn't have been a surprising to me but once you know once people start to reveal those intimacies then you're you're a little bit floored by oh my gosh there are really different expectations around what is okay and what is not okay in terms of of how people are treated, men or women and what people are allowed to do to each other. And I think people who study conflict are not necessarily aware of how different those norms are and I wouldn't say this just this is not just with respect to sexual violence or physical violence is true across the board in terms of how your society is run, you know what is okay and what is not okay. And until we understand where we sit ourselves right as individuals within our own society. And then how we understand how other people that we are conversing with in those conflict contexts be they, you know, international NGOs be they, you know, community organizations, local NGOs national organizations, armed groups, whoever it may be, until you understand where those people sit within their hierarchy of power, and where they sit within their hierarchy of gendered norms and how they think about those issues, and then contrast them to what our expectations are and how we think that they think about it. Right. I think you'll see this this huge disjuncture and understanding that disjuncture I think is really critical to being able to transform things and I don't think we understand them and I don't think we even understand ourselves and I definitely think we don't understand the other side. I think we think that we think that we understand the other side but we really don't. And until we get at that. I feel like a lot of this is, we're talking at cross purposes. So, so that's a that's a long winded way of saying, I think we need a lot better research and data and understanding before we can actually move forward on some of this transformational work. Great. Thank you. I definitely think there's a long road ahead, but it's good to see so many great feminist scholars both here today and more generally who are working on these issues. We have one member of the audience who would like to ask a question in person. Richard level nights. If maybe Henry can help me promote him to panelists. That would be great. Right, I started my video can you see in here. Great. Okay, I think this was something that we're on except right at the beginning but I'm in a UK based security company as two of my colleagues are on the call with me. Although we're UK based we work in conflict zones around the world. We've been trying hard to increase the numbers of women we employ, particularly these days as world business and governmental aid and I have to say our clients are mostly in inverted commas, Western ones. We've been trying to localize in the COVID era because there's less travel and so on and therefore companies are trying much harder to recruit locally. In the meantime, we're trying to recruit, obviously more women into our ranks. We're not talking only about seniors and managers, although obviously those essential as well, but we need people coming in at all levels. We can start at any level and sort of work up a career if you like, finding such recruits from a UK standing point has been phenomenally difficult traditionally, no matter how hard we try. And from what particularly what very very unique said, I think they might be missing an opportunity to recruit women who've got firsthand experience of conflict in a completely different way than perhaps we've been looking at it in the past. They're sort of taking places in their countries and in their own regions and if you've got any thoughts about that one including, you know, how one might set about making use of that opportunity if it exists, and particularly managing the risks that that might bring with it. I'd be interested apologies for a very long question. Thank you so much before I let the panelists answer would you mind just briefly introduce yourself. Yeah, yeah, sure. Can you still hear me. Yeah. The, our company is pilgrims group. We work, we've got an office down in Woking. We do man guiding around the UK and we work as I say, in various places around the world. We've got offices in Afghanistan and Iraq and Nigeria and so on. But I'm the director of the risk. I mean, interestingly, I mean I confess it up front, you know, I am a male on an all male board. We want to put that right, but somehow we feel we've got to start at every level and not just board level, although we wish to do that. Emma, should I answer that. Sure, go ahead for any. Yeah, thanks for asking this question I mean I exactly I started my input by saying that I think women with direct experiences of waging conflict. I'm an untapped resource for peace building a developer and I think this goes for all different types of sectors of peace building, including the ones that you're describing. I think as I've described in the previous question these women are often invisible and hard to find though I think they are more and more easy to be found when especially when they self organized to make themselves more visible for instance by setting up like female combatants associations and so forth like in I've talked about two examples but also in Nepal, like two years ago. I don't know if you know but the Maoist they had several thousand female fighters that have become totally much remanded allies except for the first few that went to the parliament and to enter kind of a position that so they've set up an association to try to find and be more visible and more attractive on the job market. And on this I would say that actually, if we think about those women and the kinds of skills that they bring it's a mix of hard and soft skills that, including that are coming from their experiences during the conflict. So, I think there's usually a lot of peace building agencies think of those women like and when they think about the types of jobs that can be offered to them when they think about the trainees that can be offered to them they come with very stereotypical ideas around what kinds of jobs those women would like to like to do and even though I would say I mean as you know as the experiences that they've had through the conflict has has brought them a number of skills in various dimensions but also it has brought them a lot of self confidence access outreach possibilities and opportunities to play roles as as as bridge builders as community leaders, and I think a lot of those skills can be helpful in the in many sectors from the media to civil society organizations to to the open sector to the business sector and so forth and so I'm happy you're asking that question and I'm hoping that this will also open your eyes and those of your partners on this untapped resource in terms of risks I mean I think yeah the risks are probably not very different from a lot of women in post-war societies in general you know the risks that are linked to maybe the traumas they went they went through the the vulnerability that might they might have given their status and their identities as and the roles that they've played in the conflict I mean we've seen in Colombia how so many female female combatants are being targeted and made vulnerable and legal status might have some issues and so forth but as I said I think the risks are manageable and they are not that different from from from what most women in post-war societies are going through I hope that helps. Great. Thank you. That was great. We have a question next, which I think is really interesting from Emily. And she asks, how can people from sexual minorities be brought to the table in post conflict settings. Approximately 10% of the population are outside of the heteronormative sexual sexuality spectrum. How can they be considered with their specific needs. So this is quite a big question. Is there anyone who has kind of a burning desire to address it? Yeah, I think I often avoid the desire to do this sort of checklist approach to thinking about experiences and I want to combine this with another question in the Q&A around class right so if we think about people's experiences of the world. We are sitting both at this intersection of questions of gender which is where questions of sexuality sexual orientation are bound up particularly given how our society understands or rather maps experiences of sexuality and sexual orientation into onto our bodies and how they look. We think about class, so my experiences as a woman are deeply connected to my race, my gender, and my class positioning and all of these factors determine how I occupy a space. Now, when I make the argument that while it is important to think about the breadth of experiences that people bring to a room, there are also huge risks that we arrive at. This is what the history of the feminist movement has taught us. The risks that we arrive at when we begin to essentialize experiences. And that what we should rather be asking the question around is what is it about our gendered and sexuality experiences offers to how we think about how race and class all come together to produce specific forms of inequalities. It is it is quite likely that what we should be looking for is a people who can take all of those boxes, rather than say that the reason why you're going to be in the room today is because you are a lesbian you're the lesbian that is sitting on the table today the only thing you're required to talk about a lesbian issues. It is also quite likely that the lesbian is also somebody who's gendered as a woman is also the person who happens to be a woman from an ethnic minority is also somebody who happens to come from a particular socio economic status. There's this sort of puzzling out of experiences that leads us to very sort of essentialist and instrumentalized approaches so I recognize the importance of the question and what the speaker is asking about but I would encourage us to think much more of how I am sitting at the intersection of a range of other sort of societal structural understandings of human beings and that might be the most productive way to think about it because what we have learned as women's movements as the feminist movement is this notion of where the women in the room has often led to this idea as well that I'm sorry Emma you're here as the women representative don't talk about real politics. You just tell us how we get 10 more women into exposed and excellent you sort of siloed into a particular way of speaking or a way of interpreting and understanding the world. So that is important. It leads to the siloed a siloed approach that undermines the very essence of why we were asking for that participation in the first place. Okay. Thank you so much. And that is, you know, it's true what you're saying but it also makes it infinitely more complex to approach these issues. I have one question as well from Helen Fielding. Do you think the gender equality is being seen as an objective to achieve rather than a tool for improvement within conflict and security. Claire do you want to go first answering this question. A few messages flash up at once. Yeah I think that is too often the case that gender equality is seen as the end rather than a means to an end although you know in some ways it's both and it links to the previous question I suppose. I think we know is absolutely right about this, the risk of the essentialist approach if you have women in the room if you have lesbian and gay bisexual people in the room they're asked just to speak to those issues and I think we've really seen that in the gender equality security agenda a sense in which women should be restricted to talking about say women's right to own land, rather than the broader questions around unequal land ownership per se. And I think it's one of the ways in which a lot of really crucial dynamics that are essential to talk about if we are going to achieve a genuine peace and post war recovery. There are things like the rebuilding of infrastructure after war physical infrastructure and social infrastructure. What a country is going, you know it's approached to its natural resources are you going to orient the economy around extraction and export of natural resources. Those kind of big fundamental political economic questions are are seen as separate somehow from the women peace security agenda, like we would have women in the room to talk about women's issues only. And that's what the real problem is I think so it's about recognizing that the participation question is around bringing marginalized voices to bear on those fundamental economics societal political questions that are of importance to everyone. I was similarly thinking about the question that was asked about class and that that that it's absolutely crucial to be thinking about class and race and gender together there's no there's no point in doing a gender analysis without also thinking about those other inequalities of power and inequalities and really I think a feminist approach is, you know, more often than not it is attentive to intersecting inequalities. It's about recognizing power hierarchies inequalities and working to eradicate all of them, recognizing that they're each inflicts the other, rather than only being concerned with the advancement of women and gender equality that would be my, that would be my take. I'm so sorry. Thank you again. And that was a great response and we are now almost running out of time but I want to just give everyone a chance to have a discussion about some of the topics that have come up. Um, so just as a question to all the panelists and one quite general question that I think it's really interesting is how can internet the international community be persuaded to not ignore women's issues. And Christine, maybe you can start with this one. Um, how can they be persuaded. I think they are being persuaded. I think, I think that discourse conversation is more prominent than it's ever been. Right. We have, we have quite a strong WPS agenda that I think is having traction. I think the conversations are taking place, but, and I, I want to highlight the question that that Sanjay put into the chat here that was directed at, you know, and thinking about, well, how do you really make it stick. And as somebody who is politically active. I really think about who sits in the room and the considerations that they bring to the top table when these kinds of discussions are taking place, right? That the people's experiences really inform how they behave in the room. And that is part of the mechanism for getting change enacted. But until you have people who have had a variety of different kinds of experiences. That changes is more difficult if you, if you don't have those voices in the room advocating and then on top of that, you have to have people who are willing to put themselves in their careers on the line. And, and fight for you. And if you don't have that structure, the powers of structure in the room, those voices aren't there. You can have gender equality in principle in terms of numbers, but that's a really different thing from having it. You know, in terms of being able to actually force those changes through you need a constituency. And sometimes the constituencies inside the room sometimes it's amongst those who have power within say, you know, political parties or within the government within the bureaucracy, sometimes though, and I would say, and I think we're seeing more and more of this, it comes from the outside from social movements, where you get the big push. Right. That's how we are able to get a lot of those big changes and those collective voices together have now allowed us, say, to see huge changes on on the climate issues for young people who have really different attitudes about these then, then, you know, people of my generation have said this is important, critical, and we must see the change it must happen and they are taking their voices to the streets right so I feel like there's a space there for trying to enact that kind of social change that doesn't just come from inside the room but also comes from outside. And when those voices come together you do see the potential for, okay, if you don't do something. People are going to riot right and, and I would like to see that kind of power taken to the streets around these issues of gender. And we know that, that some of these changes can be really effective and sometimes it's, it's small tweaks. You can see this, the small tweaks that actually have quite transformative changes, you know, like, and I can imagine to that things like changing boards changing quotas, somebody comes into power they, you know, you get a particular person who makes that push, the change happens, and then all of the norms around those particular institutions change, and then that helps create a new generation of female voices, male less, you know, with different kinds of masculinities as Emma was referring to earlier, change the possibilities for what men and women and boys and girls can become. And, you know, all of the kind of gender fluctuations allow for just new imaginings of how we interact with each other so that's kind of where I'm hoping things will go and I'm really hopeful for that, you know, for my generation of students. That's great to have a bit of a hopeful note there. We have time for maybe some brief comments from the other panelists if you want to add something to this question on persuading the international community before we move on to our concluding remarks. So if any of the panelists want to raise their hand, if they want to add something. Or if not, we can go on to the concluding remarks. Great. Just before we do this, I see a comment here from one of the attendees who wants to thank Elina for her comment about not seeing people purely as a single through a single lens. And this person is currently reviewing an equality strategy, which does exactly that only refers to people in their group and not across all of who they are. So that was a relevant point for them and something that they needed to hear. So that was great that people are finding this debate today useful. I'm not going to give everyone just one or two minutes to put in your concluding remarks before we end the panel today. And maybe we can start with very unique. Yeah, thanks for this very interesting discussion and the wealth of contributions as well from the audience. I think there is, I mean, just jumping on the last question, I think there is still a lot that can be done to force or entice or persuade the international community to take all women seriously I mean I think the 1925 agenda has has advanced a lot in the last 20 years but there are still some gaps, I think to be filled. I think there are still some women, some women's issues and needs that are not being addressed in those policies. I mean I'm seeing a lot of donors that are that say we want to work with grassroots peace builders or grassroots peace building women but as soon as we're bringing somebody as soon as being too radical or too political actually oh okay maybe not those ones right. So I think yeah I think a lot a lot can still be done. I loved what I heard earlier about participation being a means to an end and not an end in itself and I think yeah it had made me think a lot throughout this this session I think it's it's very true, and I think still a lot of focus in the WPS agenda is on increasing women's participation you know there's this old recipes quotas and so forth that are still being tried and and I think we always have to remind ourselves that participation in itself doesn't need to power. And that yeah and that and that and that participation is not enough to change gender norms in society so I love that and I'll stay on that reflection. Thank you. Thank you so much. We can move on to a winner. And again thank you as well to Claire Veronique and Christine for the for the conversation this morning and to the participants. I want to emphasize really one thing in the closing comments and it sort of connects to this idea of finding people, including, you know, queer activists or women, or local movements. And I think that one of the things I've learned over time before I became an academic is that if you if you're interested in paying attention to what is happening in the society, go and talk to social movements. Whether those are formally organized in in organizations, or whether those exist within loose networks, or, or other kinds of formations that are driving change in the society. And when I make the argument that rather than walking around looking for a checklist of people, and I'm thinking more intersectionally that is not a complex task, actually, because there are very many activists feminist activists queer activists who are sitting in diverse spaces, who are doing the kind of critical work and questioning that Claire was suggesting is what you bring into a space sort of analytical lens around understanding inequalities in our society by privileging our experiences. It's not about your experiences in the room your experiences matter because they enable us to enlarge and expand how we view structure inequalities and how to therefore devise strategies to resolve those inequalities. One of the things that often says that the feminist maxim, the personal is political is one of the most abused phrases that have ever come across, because one of the emphasis and the personal is political is not about your individual experiences is that your individual experiences collectively put together, tell us something about how particular groups of people experience exclusion in the society, because the minute we begin to sort of atomize individuals around very specific set of experiences we're never going to find a common point. We're never going to find a common point because our individual experiences are always bound to be very different so listen to movements find movements, and a lot of the radical work that is being done at the moment by feminist movements, trying to imagine different ways of organizing learning, organizing higher education, organizing how our society looks like in this so called post COVID-19 world. Those are the voices that we should be paying attention. Those are the ideas that we should be paying attention to, because they offer as much more expansive ways of understanding freedom on justice, which for some of us given where we are located, we tend to be much more disciplined in thinking about evidence and things in certain ways. But when you're getting on with the task of saying, these are the experiences we've been tracking over the last 10 years. This is what they're telling us, and this is where we need to go. So find them listen to them, read their work, engage with their projects for social transformation. Thank you. Thank you. That was great. And we're now moving on to Claire. Thanks. I suppose I would like our concluding thought to be thinking about the time that we're in, the point I made about the urgency of the crisis and the ecological clock ticking and the inequalities crisis that really profoundly shape the security picture of today, the security that people feel. And need to echo Veronica, I suppose it makes me want to kind of retain a critical perspective on these questions around participation, representation is recruiting more women to the security sector, really the policies that we are needing to address these urgent crises. So I'm not saying that they're not, but I am saying that that's the question we always need to be asking ourselves, and what are the policies that are and demands that are going to be sufficient to address these urgent global crises. And I think the idea of non reformist reforms is a useful one coming from black feminist and prison abolitionist thought this idea that yes it's really important that we, we don't just talk about system transformation as academics and not have actionable policies concrete and policy requests we need those two but when we are thinking about what the concrete small things we can do, we always need to have an eye on what's the transformation we want to see and think about are the reforms I'm asking for non reformist reforms are they bringing about transformation. I think that is a really crucial framework for us to kind of keep in mind if we're thinking about this, these, the scale of the challenge of addressing the urgent ecological crises and the massive immiseration of people and the insecure situation which they live across the world. Thank you very much Claire. And last but of course not least is Christine for her final remarks. Thanks Emma. And I'm thinking about now just what Claire said about this time, and this moment. And it makes me think about the fact that you know the the political adage you know never waste a good crisis. And the fact that these moments where and I would say this is true also about beginnings and ends of wars. And when there is a huge moment for crisis, there's also a huge potential for serious major transformational change of gender norms of social norms. I fear that in this case with the pandemic that things are actually going backward. But I think in some places, if you think about those spaces of crisis as opportunities to really reshape structures in a way that's just not normally possible when things are kind of marching along as normal. Then you think about where those opportunities sit, and then you try and really capitalize on them when they come your way and they might not come your way for a generation or more but when they do come, then that's the, that's the time and I think about this in terms of legitimizing new ideas and the kinds of legitimizing of new ideas that I've seen in this space around gender and peace building and and civil wars that has really been quite transformational for those of you who are in your 20s. This is not the space that that I went through as a scholar so long ago as I was saying earlier in my comments that this is a really new dynamic exciting space that is much more legitimized that it's ever been in the scholarship by people, not just in the feminist space but actually in the mainstream space of conflict and I find that deeply encouraging so that legitimization can absolutely occur. It's an opportunity where we can all take advantage of it in light of these big transformational changes around as you know Claire was talking about in terms of, you know, the climate crisis inequalities, COVID all rock around to the ends and the beginnings of war. So, think about that as opportunities in, I guess, you know, policymakers lives for those of you who are policymakers as future policymakers and practitioners to the students in the room, you know, think about those opportunities and take full advantage of them because you are all the ones that are going to create the kinds of new gender qualities and imaginings that we all really want. It's good to finish on a slightly more optimistic or inspirational note there. Thank you so much to the panel this has been a really interesting discussion, and I have certainly learned a lot here. You know, I am personally very interested in feminism and gender theory and international relations. This is kind of an experiment when I first came to King's in September last year. I looked through my reading lists and I counted out for the first three weeks how many women were in my assigned readings and out of 180 authors about 30 were women. We have a long way to go. But as we have heard here today, gender is becoming more mainstream but I would argue that it still isn't there yet. When an institution like KCL only has 30 women in the first three weeks of the reading list for a master course. But we have a lot of hopeful kind of ideas looking forward. And I think that there's a lot of room for improvement for sure. My main takeaway from today is that a feminist analysis isn't about bringing women to the room where men are negotiating, but about really looking at the power structures and the dynamics, which influence where different genders and different identities have access. And that's really the key takeaway, which is such a difficult task, and it makes it infinitely more challenging to really apply a rigorous gender analysis. But it's also something that a lot of very intelligent people, including the people in this room today are working hard to accomplish. So thank you so so much for participating in the debate today.