 Thank you. Thank you very much, Paivi. It's great to be able to participate in this discussion, despite not having been able to make it to Helsinki this time. So good afternoon. I'm speaking from Sri Lanka. It's afternoon time here. Great to meet you all. And it was fantastic to listen to all the excellent research and presentations that were given by all of you. I would like to commence my remarks by personalising them for a moment and telling you a little bit about myself, because it relates to conflict and the conflict in my country. So I am a child of war. I was born into the conflict in Sri Lanka. And for the first 25 years of my life, all I knew was conflict. So I grew up amidst bloodshed, brutality and insecurity right through my childhood and adult life. Also to say that I hail from a triple minority background in the country. So I come from an ethnic minority background, a linguistic minority background and a religious minority background. And the reason to share this is because to say that it has shaped the way I view conflict and contribute to the resolution of conflicts in Sri Lanka and around the world in terms of all the work I do. I'm also a member of the women mediators across the Commonwealth since its founding in 2018. So being a child of the war and from a triple minority background, I was determined from the time I was growing up to be a part of the generation and to be a part of a movement that does everything possible to ensure that there is no resurgence or relapse to conflict and war in my country or the region because we see the consequences of war and I have seen it real time growing up. So moving on to the insights I wish to share, I want to say that they do link with what I've been hearing all the panelists speak about in terms of the impact of conflict on displacement, violence, women as ex-combatants, and the aspect which I want to share some perspectives on and which is also connected to some research that was conducted by the women mediators across the Commonwealth is the role that women play in leadership and in peace processes. This is also very relevant to me because I have been very involved both in informal and formal processes of peace-building in the country in Sri Lanka and also you may be aware that Sri Lanka has both of the first woman Prime Minister in the world and we also have had the first woman president in Asia and I had the honor of working with her when she headed the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation where I worked under her chairmanship leading the process for drafting and developing Sri Lanka's first national policy on reconciliation. Now the reason to share this is because in this policy and I would like to speak a little bit about the importance of policy processes and the impact it has for contribution of women in inclusion and meaningful inclusion in peace processes and I come from a perspective of saying how involvement and meaningful involvement of women in peace processes is important from three perspectives and they relate to all the themes of the presentations that were shared today. One is of course to provide them agency, it provides power, it empowers women when they are given a seat at the table and provided an opportunity to contribute and shape these processes. The second I would argue is that they have an impact on protecting women from violence, from further violence and also for speaking on behalf of those who have endured violence and also sharing perspectives on how women are impacted by violence. The third point I would like to argue is that meaningful inclusion of women in peace processes also helps in their healing so whether they have been female combatants, if they have been victims of violence I believe that being involved and provided the agency and empowerment to partake in peace processes is a way of providing agency for them and empowering women. So what I would like to do is to just share with you an example of two provisions that we included in the National Policy on Reconciliation in Sri Lanka. It is a way of illustrating how women's involvement in peace processes can help address and resolve in a post war context all the issues that were discussed today from being ex combatants, from being victims of violence, from being victims of forced displacement, from being war widows and so on and so forth. So please allow me to read two provisions from the National Policy of Reconciliation of Sri Lanka. The first is a substantive provision and just to say these are not the only provisions that make reference to women. We were very keen to ensure that the gender dimension and the gender dynamic of conflict and peace was reflected throughout the policy process and throughout all the clauses. Now just to take you to one of the substantive clauses, I call it the equality provision and this is how we define equality and you will see how it covers the spectrum of issues in conflict and post-conflict resolution. And I quote, to ensure gender equality in all national initiatives, develop protection mechanisms for vulnerable women around the country, redress and provide reparation to women who have endured violence and here we mean all types of violence and promote agency of women as partners in decision making and as agents of change. So as was mentioned by Paivi and others today, this is a recognition of the fact that women should not be seen merely as victims of conflict and in post-conflict state not merely as beneficiaries of peace programs but they should be viewed and empowered to function and serve as equal partners in peace processes and the only way that can be done meaningfully is with a conducive enabling environment. The second procedural clause that I would like to share with you is how we looked at ensuring that the gender dynamics of conflict and peace are seen throughout the process of policy making and through its implementation and I quote, to proactively look for gender relevance at every step of policy implementation and when designing reconciliation and coexistence initiatives to build a culture of respect between women and men through reconciliation initiatives and while recognizing that a large number of women have been victims of conflict and violence and require redress and reparation they must be engaged as equal partners in reconciliation processes with space to contribute and participate in dignity. So you will see how these provisions and clauses and this perspective and vision is so wide ranging that it does not ignore or neutralize or trivialize the impacts of war on women and them being victims but also emphasizes how it is important that they be elevated to be equal partners to contribute and participate in dignity and very quickly I would like for this to flow into my second very brief set of comments of research conducted by the women mediators of the Commonwealth which I've been a member of where we looked at when speaking about women's meaningful inclusion in peace processes what are some of the factors the enabling factors that contribute to the meaningful inclusion of women in peace processes of course there are several and they are non-exhausted but why I'm sharing with you about four or five is just as a beginning of the discussion and these are shared from the point of view of enabling women peacemakers to apply skills to good effect but also to highlight that the priority and intention is to fundamentally transform the wider peacemaking system so what does this mean it means to make peace processes more inclusive and equitable that goes beyond the focus on direct armed conflict to include structural and societal violence so not looking at violence only from a direct individualized perspective but from a wider structural and societal perspective which often are linked to patriarchy in societies so just to highlight very quickly a few enabling factors that came out of our research one is the importance of networks and even being a part of such conversations discussions in communities such as this in today's platform is an example of how it enables and encourages and improves women's participation so it was found that local national and international networks play an important role in bringing women together across geographies and identity gaps they act as an effective mechanism for support and collaboration among women peacemakers as well as a conduit for qualified women to find entry points into peace negotiations networks also act as a support mechanism for career development or as a means for establishing a collective voice to advocate against obstacles the second point I would like to highlight is the importance of visibility and recognition for women's participation and contribution in peace processes so very often their roles impact and success are overlooked yet women are known to work across multiple spaces and tracks both informally and formally and in between so recognition of women's value within formal peace processes is minimal and this has to be beefed up and improved the second the third point I would like to mention is the important of role models which often act as an important source of inspiration and encouragement for women in peace processes I can personally vouch for this to evidence having worked with the former president of Sri Lanka directly under her chairmanship where she served as a role model for me in guiding and mentoring me through my work and even beyond so this really provides agency and empowerment for women the fourth point to mention is the importance of intergenerational collaboration which refers to both to support and mentorship for younger women by older and more experienced women in peace processes but also conversely for younger women to share their fresh insights and perspectives they come with less baggage and for these to be shared with senior women mediators and peacemakers while of course preserving respect and appreciation for expertise and wisdom and final point to mention is the importance of training and professional development which is critical in in advancing careers of women however a word of caution here is that very often training is often seen as an easy solution for engagement of women in peace processes and this default should be avoided it is important that to note that it is insufficient unless systemic barriers that prevent access to former spaces former peacemaking spaces and peace negotiations are addressed that such training and professional development will not see dividends so those are a few insights I would like to share and I would like to conclude with a question to all participants to all presenters here today coming from this perspective of meaningful inclusion and leadership of women in peace processes I'm very curious to know whether it surfaced anywhere in your research findings or analysis how women's impact of violence or forced displacement of being ex-combatants have affected their role and participation in peace processes how have they shaped how have they impacted the role they play in post-conflict or post-war situations of peacemaking has it affected it and maybe it didn't surface and was not in the purview of your research but I'm very curious to know whether any of this surfaced in the analysis or findings the second part of this is to ask whether if there was any analysis or findings on how these roles impacted the participation of women or those women in peace processes did you find that there were more comfortable in informal peacemaking roles or did they feel more comfortable in engaging in formal processes did you see a difference or not and finally of course was there an opportunity to see how young women young women's roles in peacemaking were affected by being victims of violence by being ex-combatants or being victims of forced displacement so I would like to conclude my remarks there and thank you for your patient hearing thank you very much Salma for your for your intervention here and tying it all into how it leads to peacemaking and participation so thank you for those comments so I would while I saw that all the our panelists took note of course Augustine I couldn't check on you because you are not visible at the moment here but that you took notes of comments and questions made by you Salma but I thought maybe we could also take in addition few few comments and questions from the audience and then get back to you would that be okay so let's start there in the front please so all right it came all the presentations were really so informing and great thank you I have one question for Diana and Joseline and one for Pablo so for the first presentation I was just wondering if you have found any you presented the summary of your findings and I will definitely read the working papers so were there any intergenerational effect of the displacement and exposure to conflict and if you have found any age group differences I was really curious and also if you can comment about the impact of education so were there like more vulnerabilities I assume for the lower part of the distribution and my question for Carlo you mentioned maybe you can extend the discussion about least experiment I was just really curious about it how if we have time how it was possible really to ask this very sensitive question in an anonymous way so I will be so glad if you can extend it and also the country differences are so great I mean it's at the same time alarming so what do you think about like cross-country uh quantitative analysis of sex violence are also gender-based violence because it seems you know there are lots of bias or the for the existing studies so if they do this country cross-country you know comparisons thank you I'd also like to congratulate all the panelists for really engaging presentations and to our discussant as well so thank you very much all of you I have two questions and the first one is to Carlo and then a follow-up to Augustine so for Carlo I'd like to see whether you could expand a bit on how gender analysis informs your work and your approach to the subject so particularly I would be curious to know how what sort of framework you use how patriarchy or differences in power relationships between men and women frame your the way that you ask the research questions and your understanding of their results as we are in a gender session so I have one more question which is to Augustine so it was a very fascinating presentation and so thank you for that I wondered whether you'd trace through any of the impacts of the strength in female leadership both at the formal level and at the level of competence in the peace and informal more civil society organizations two outcomes in Liberia post-independent post-civil war so for example in land holdings in representatives in parliament or in other kind of indicators of gender equality has there been progress as a result of these greater representation of women at different levels of the political economy thank you very much and I see one more question at the back row there and one here so yeah let's take those two if okay for you and then we'll hello hi you have said from the Nordic Development Fund so we fund climate projects in developing countries and for our projects they have to be 100 gender mainstreamed and we do require a gender analysis so I was just wondering in conflict or post-conflict situations is there something that a gender analysis should take into account beyond what is usually done or is there something that is is sometimes forgotten when a gender analysis is carried out in in such more more difficult situations thank you the presenter on violent and non-conflict violent in Liberia covalent and non violent combatants or groups in Liberia my question is what are the emerging conflict of interest among this group the violent and non-violent groups because you you made mention of Sri Lanka Liberia there should be a variation or and there must be some conflict of interest among this group so how can you extrapolate conflict of interest of that of Sri Lanka Liberia thank you much for the questions and now we have questions from our discussant and from the audience so I I'll give you a chance to respond and do you let's start from an order of presentations so Diana and Choslyn if you want to start please is it working great thank you so much for these thoughtful questions and particularly the question about intergenerational effects so one of the things that came up for us when doing this work was we were struck by the implications this has for the cyclicality of conflict so if you basically understand that you know a lot of the effects of violent conflict can become hidden but create these kind of ripple effects within communities it's important firstly to acknowledge that but secondly we know that in our own research and it's been super well established in the literature that a huge risk factor for both perpetrating and experiencing violence is exposure to violence in childhood right and we certainly saw that in our work so if someone had witnessed their father beating their mother they had experienced violence within the home they were much more likely to be a victim of multiple forms of gender-based violence and we also know it's linked to perpetration so the question about kind of how this research speaks to the intergenerational effects I think unfortunately it's not direct we haven't been able to trace some of those intergenerational effects directly but one of the things that I think you raise that would be fascinating to do in future is look at whether exposure to violent conflict during certain sensitive periods changes the way that you might then think about violent conflict and experience GBV going forward you know is exposure in that really sensitive moment around the age of 12 to 15 more impactful than exposure at other times and that certainly goes back to the remarks from this morning as well and you know they're thinking about those sensitive periods and how that comes up and I know Diana will have something to say about the role of education we did see that that varied a little bit from context to context and how significant it was etc so I'll just speak briefly to that and I was going to just appreciate the note about the conflict climate gender nexus I will say it's something that we had a slide and moved it to the additional slides just in the interest of time but in my personal work it's something that we think about a lot and really exploring how we can better understand the gendered impacts of climate change really analyze them more thoughtfully and also think about the intersections between GBV specifically and climate change and I think we've talked a lot during the conflicts about problematizing the fact that it's really hard to identify climate change broadly as a driver for migration or as a driver for many of these issues a lot of times people talk about you know it's hunger it's scarcity it's you know other kinds of dynamics that are created by climate change but people often don't name it in that particular way but I think we're getting better and better at working into our analyses and better and better at starting to quantify some of those impacts yeah no thanks I mean just add on the education we see it both as a protective factor in some cases but not always and in different quintiles of wealth when we look at that as well but it's not always in the same relationship and so you'll see that in the papers and then on what to to look at when gender mainstream and in climate change I think that's a really great question one of the motivators of our research was to really show kind of the continuum of violence that was experienced by women but also how forced displacement and conflict increases those experiences of violence and I don't think that we're asking systematically how if you've been displaced and looking at the different forms of intimate partner violence or other forms of violence that might be experienced because of displacement and conflict usually because of the framing coming from security council resolutions we really dug into sexual violence as a weapon of war and I think we have to expand our understanding of the continuum of violence that women face in public and private spaces so I would say don't ask if you've experienced gender-based violence in your analysis but I do think you can recognize that there is vulnerability with displacement and exposure to conflict that then can be tied in to the interventions and policy recommendations that you would implement within a community where you know that one out of three women has experienced some form of violence and then on top of that if you've been forcibly displaced you're more likely to have experienced violence within the home or outside the home and that's something really important to take into account because I do think that climate change interventions or interventions across multiple sectors have a role to play in either preventing or responding to the needs of women who've experienced violence so I would like to see in any type of gender analysis a recognition of the experiences of women who've experienced violence not just to put them in the framework as victims but they're survivors and they need support to continue on their path of healing so that would be something I would recommend okay I'm gonna respond maybe to your question first just I don't want to take up too much time but perhaps could you help me pull up the presentation and I can give you a brief taste how this looks like right and we could talk later on I think this list experiment is actually quite easy to implement and and useful and effective way to understand sensitive attitudes for instance if you imagine attitudes towards FGM towards victim blaming things that people just don't want to share to an enumerator that they don't know right so I mean it's the same for us actually if I respond to a survey I may not want to share certain sensitive information and that's the same for people in in conflict affected populations thank you so much so the way this looks like is so it basically looks like that right so you have people are being asked to tell you how many experiences of a specific list of experiences they experience actually and you will randomly split the sample into a control and a treatment group so the survey software can do that and then only the treatment group will receive the sensitive experience in this case it would be for instance sexual violence but it can be racist attitudes it can be substance abuse or anything right and then you can basically do some some modeling and understand the prevalence of the sensitive experience or attitude that's that's how this works so the country differences right that you mentioned I think what the most striking finding for us was that there are indeed I mean there are some country differences of course I mean it's social science research it's you know it's a lot of noise in data typically but what is still striking is like that across all three countries for this local civic participation which I think is a relatively good proxy for everyday peacemaking and peace building right so when and that relates to Salma's point actually so if we find that people are more engaged in their communities right that there is more associational life that is actually how everyday peace making and peace building looks like in communities we don't have this I mean sometimes there are these local level peace conferences but that is a rare event right the common form of peacemaking at the local level is interacting engaging with your fellow community members and also with people outside of your community and we don't have a lot of data on that on a cross survey level but for Congo we had we have more detailed data and what we find here is it's not just about being member of a community association this this effect is across a lot of different other outcomes that we could interpret as a good measure of local life so it's about the frequency of interpersonal exchanges it's about engagement in events so for instance participation in community based work it's there's a little bit of an effect on on donating behavior and also organizational leadership and membership so it seems that this is a more general pattern actually and it lines up also with some prior research right I want to touch upon this point what kind of gender analysis informed our our research right in a way we depart from a lot of the traditional gender research because we both are what I would describe as as empirical social scientists so we have a and our approach is generally to have a theory guided research question and hypothesis that we then try to empirically answer and a lot of the literature of course comes with this perspective of gender analysis right so a lot of the more normative literature a lot of the case specific literature has an inbuilt gender analysis and that's actually our what we would refer to as null hypothesis right so we would assume that a lot of the patriarchal norms in a society would make it very difficult actually for women to or for people who both women and men who are victims of sexual violence right so we need to be very clear here that this is not I mean the majority of survivors are women but it's not that men are not affected at all so I think this is we come more with a kind of we come with a sort of like open approach into that actually and recognize the large gender based or feminist literature which is basically the backbone to all this research informing not just of course our studies but a lot of the other quantitative literature as well and I think that the point that we want to make here is that although it's not a traditional approach in in in gender studies to use quantitative approaches it has been shown among others there are coins work has been really I would say revolutionary that it can it can account for selection bias in purely qualitative work and and show patterns that haven't been recognized before right so it can basically help to investigate some widely held assumptions actually and and and see and basically ask new questions or help ask new questions and if you don't mind let's check Augustine first yeah would you like to go next yeah thanks for the questions I mean the both questions are excellent questions by the way I will start over the one that has to do with emerging conflict of interest I mean sat in the case in Sri Lanka where actually I think Sri Lanka and Liberia including Rwanda they have almost similar scenario I mean and study has proven that both all these countries suffer like they have structural change at the end of the armed conflict I mean because we had like like because there was a failure of the male dominated systems there are a lot of male dominated systems that have failed so like in Rwanda I mean women became prominent they became breadwinner because due to the absence of their male counterpart who died during the conflict in Sri Lanka there was a structural change as well as in Liberia of course failure of male dominated system hard be it I mean back to the core of your question that has to do with conflict of interest between the two groups the combating and non combating in Liberia the reason is that the non combating group has a specific interest their interest is regime change and that group is not a standalone group like the group I show you is not a standalone group it's a component of a rebel group and a rebel group they call Laura Liberia United for Reconstruction and Democracy that's a settler rebel group has a female brigade and the goal of that rebel group a regime change the other group which is the non combating group their goal was peace so they were like a form of mediator so in terms of interest conflict of interest of course you know doing peace do your negotiation you see most of the time is you find out that a warring faction or warring group we have to be fighting doing power distribution that is who gets what who gets political position in terms of a peace deal like if a law rebel the royal rebel group says hey I need the finance minister oh I need the minister of defense I need this job these things these things usually happen during a negotiation of a truce but the non combating group were exclusively out of that because their intro for just peace they were not really interested into political positions but the political position were interested by the by the belligerents belligerent usually get a share of the power because as the general rule of thumb doing negotiation and settlement I mean you got to divide the position in accordance with or in proportion with what are the group territory or whatever it is depending on the internal dynamics of the negotiation so at that level you don't see interest color as much but what happens during peace deal as time you know that the women women or youth are also incorporated because it's incumbent upon negotiator to incorporate uh uh the civil society for example the media the interfaith council the women the youth they're all incorporated into the peace deal yeah I hope they have answered your question all right on the issue that has to do with representation at the at the formal and informal sector that's a that's a great question and I think at the like like say my artwork for a female president for 12 years Ellen Johnson Salih I mean and I'm proud to say that I mean she had a very excellent leadership now uh actually what happens in Liberia we had this Patricia Domina society that was back in the days where women were not allowed to own property like land I mean women could not own the land in Liberia I mean but but that have changed times have changed the first thing that Ellen did was for example like land issue she established a land reform commission land reform commission means people can own land irrespective of who you are irrespective of your gender what a male female another thing is I mean there were women chiefs or female chief if you like like chief of police was a female chief of immigration or female or justice minister female even at the court where the supreme court supreme court bench had female their name there as associate justice I mean also there's in the military the military set a court for female you know prior to the conflict the military was in view as a male dominated game I mean hey the army is for the male it's a male name for the female but after the war I mean right now we have a deputy chief a style of the armed forces of Liberia it's a female she's a general and Medici had kind of a reform at that level also there was free education for female for girls and that was that was called launched by Michelle Obama she flew into Liberia and they launched a free education for girls and one thing that she did that's very important too was was a rib law the rib law was kind of a little dumb and or let's say passive but begin very active one of her regime I mean you had you had the rib law in force and there was some let's listen especially in terms of marriages you have men marrying girls as low as 12 or 14 years old and these were these were law and policies that she actually repaired at the local level you had chiefs like traditional chief or village chief becoming female you had a traditional women groups coming to prominence I mean and a lot of female were being given or awarded chief titles these are titles that were predominantly set for male prior to the conflict so all in all I believe that she don't wear especially in terms of the rule of law and other aspects both formally and informally thank you and Dami Lola please like to say that from examples I've seen women tend to turn to informal networks on organization examples we have loan committees we have mother groups and neighborhood alliances all these are set up to speak about conflict to resolve conflict and basically non-violently and most of the time informally and they also adopt what we call conduct shuttle diplomacy try to negotiate there's a kind of negotiation that is conducted by a mediator between somebody who doesn't want to come out to be seen and so they they try to adopt these means and most of the time they do this informally because as of now we don't have women in those formal positions that can actually speak except for the non-governmental organizations that are taking the roles some of these roles but when it comes to government positions formally women are still lacking they are not we don't have many women in Nigeria but when it comes to performing the roles in informal settings in the local settings these are some of the things and they also actually engage in marches and protests in southern Cardinal Cardinal women came out to protest they came out in blacks when there was a killing of their young boys and men and they kept shouting and crying to the government soft killing our young boys soft killing our men in southwest Nigeria if it's if it's women came out to protest in white with white and for them it was kind of symbolic and a kind of a ritual also against and all these are informal settings but of course one of the things I noticed about this informal model of presenting the agitations is that they have a kind of somebody who stands for them like a mentor like somebody who and cause such protests but most of these networks are done by individuals and they are done informally not like the librarian cases where we have now women informal positions and peace negotiations we don't have such cases in formal settings but we have a lot of women agitating in informal networks that's what I would say about Salman's question thank you thank you everyone for your responses you're going to be so busy during lunch break here uh continuing this discussion now I wanted to ask Salman do you have any where your questions addressed and anything you would like to say at the just like one minute sorry about that because there'll be a bit over the time and you're in mute I think one of your responses most fascinating and interesting I just want to respond to the question on gender analysis and what can be included and what tends to be missed or something additional that would add value to a gender analysis I would just like to suggest or propose three aspects that I would like to add to a gender analysis one is the recognition that women are not a homogeneous group so when gender analysis is done within a community or society very often women are categorized under one umbrella even though it is desegregated for between different communities so I would like to say that even within a community or society it would help to desegregate the focus and the data the second point to mention is I think it's very important and I have seen it personally in my work in Sri Lanka is the importance of looking at intersectionalities so the positioning of women and this is very close to linked linking with understanding their agency and how they can be involved in leadership later is their intersectionality of factors that lead to the social and cultural position of women in societies and the third point to mention is also to look at the capabilities or the capacities of women to be leaders so women from different groups or different societies or different backgrounds have different capacities and capabilities to contribute to processes peace processes at the formal or informal levels so an understanding of that also could very well be helpful in agenda analysis thank you now when you started I can't resist the temptation also to say gender analysis make sure you have dedicated gender expert doing that one and the second one is I might actually not do a separate gender analysis I would make sure that my climate analysis has a very strong gender expertise part and parcel and working there if I'm doing conflict analysis it should include gender analysis as part of it or economic analysis it should include gender expertise and gender as part of it so that it doesn't become a separate siloed issue but critical part of whatever is going on just couldn't resist the temptation of saying it was a fantastic panel excellent interventions and thank you so much everyone I'm going to reach out to you after this because there is so much in all of these research what we for example at you and women are going to need for our work so and I'm sure many others I see others nodding here so it's the case for many other organizations as well thank you so much for you all audience thank you for joining and listening these most interesting presentations and I guess enjoy your lunch sorry we kept you a little bit late and hungry from your lunch but it was worth it right thank you