 Good morning. Good morning, everyone. We do have some seats up front for those of you who are coming in. You can come right up here. Good morning. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president of the United States Institute of Peace, and I'm delighted to welcome all of you here on International Women's Day. Great to have everyone with us. I'd like to offer a very warm welcome to Norwegian Ambassador Aas and to our partners for this morning's event, the Colombian Peace Forum, Search for Common Grounds, Conflict Prevention, and Resolution Forum. For those of you who haven't been here before, US Institute of Peace was founded about 30 years ago in response to citizens' request for an institute like this. And it was dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, peace is practical, and peace is essential for our national and our global security. And we've pursued this vision of a world without violent conflict for the last 30 years by equipping people, organizations, governments at every level with the tools, the knowledge, and the training that helps them manage conflict so it doesn't become violent and to resolve it when it does. And we work directly in conflict zones. And this is particularly important today as we talk about and think about how critical it is to have the full and meaningful participation of women in managing and resolving conflict. And so a big part of this morning is to celebrate the role of women peace builders and particularly the role that the Colombian women have played in the peace process that that country is hopefully drawing to a close. We had President Santos here. Many of you may have seen him when he was here about a month ago. And he talked very movingly about how easy war is and how difficult peace is to build and to sustain. And we've seen around the world how critical it is to have women's participation in local, national, and international mediation processes and peace agreements. And evidence suggests that having women involved at every level of a peace process leads to much more successful and more sustained peace agreements. I think probably everybody here has touched or been touched somehow by UN Security Council Resolution 1325. We're now at its 15th year. And it was revolutionary at the time for its recognition of how women had been excluded. And since its adoption, it has been an important organizing tool around the world for enabling women to really be actors and agents of change around peace processes. So we're here today with a powerhouse trio of USIP women who I'm delighted to have up here this morning. Kathleen Kunis has shepherded USIP's work for seven years on issues related to 1325 and gender and peace building and truly understands the role of women's empowerment as a catalyst for inclusive and sustainable change. We have Ginny Bouvier, who has been single-handedly driving forward our work with including women in the peace processes in Columbia. And I think we'll hear more about some of her books that commemorate the process. But this has been, I believe, an extraordinary peace process from which we will learn many lessons for other processes around the world. And Ginny has been an extraordinary part of that. And I want to give a special warm welcome to our new colleague, Carla Cappell, who's joined USIP just about three weeks ago now for two and a half, two and a half as our new vice president. And Carla brings extraordinary depth of experience on inclusive security and on women and gender's issues and leadership and a strategic mind. I'm very grateful to have her with us here at USIP. And before we get to them, it is my great pleasure to introduce someone who is deeply familiar with the peace processes in Columbia, the ambassador of Norway to the United States, Ambassador Oz. And Norway has been a global leader in the efforts to promote gender equality, a strong advocate for women's participation in the Colombian peace processes, and others around the world. And Ambassador Oz has himself had a distinguished career around the world in many conflict areas. He was the ambassador in Afghanistan. You have the most intriguing title in the past of Director General for Security Policy and the High North. I want to know what the high north is. That's the Arctic. Ah, OK. But through his career, the ambassador has been a committed advocate for peace. And he has actively worked on nuclear disarmament and international peacekeeping operations for many, many years. We're delighted to have him here with us today. So to kick us off, please join me in welcoming Ambassador Oz. Thank you. Thank you very much, Nancy. And to all women in the room, congratulations on the International Women's Day. And I think we also should congratulate the men in the audience who have been actively engaged in gender issues for many years. I myself, I remember when I was working around in Oslo fighting for gender equality when I was a high school student in the 1970s. And being here today, I'm going to say it's a part of a journey. And this time, I'm here to talk about Colombia and the women's role in the peace process in Colombia. And I would also like to give some sort of remarks also related to my experiences in Afghanistan when I was an ambassador there, but also giving some reflections on what Norway is doing, for example, in Syria. But the main part of my presentation or my remarks to be on Colombia. And I'm also delighted to be on this panel and with Cathy Kunast, which is a really an expert on this issue, but also with Jean-Épauvier, who has been an instrumental in organizing this seminar this morning, and with Carla Coppel, which I have been working a lot with since I arrived in DC in September 2013. It's good to have you here at the UCIP, Carla. But I also want to thank the United States Institute of Peace and Nancy Lindbergh for inviting me here this morning. And I'm also looking forward to the panel discussions we are going to have. Let me also, by the beginning, say that I'm also very proud to be a Norwegian and to work for the Norwegian government, because Norway has a long and proud tradition in promoting gender equality and advocating women's rights globally. And as you heard from Nancy, Norway has been actively engaged in peace process throughout the world. And our values and attitudes of gender issues have guided our efforts also in these peace processes. And to successfully replace years of war and hostility with a fair and durable peace over experiences repeatedly demonstrate the importance of allowing women their rightsful place in society and political processes. Listening to and adapting perspectives of women have been crucial elements in Norway's engagement in peace processes in many countries. And I think for the time being, Norway is, I think we are actively engaged in facilitating peace processes in approximately 20 conflicts. And if we have been responding positively to all the requests we get from either insurances or government in order to deal with Norway's assistance or support in facilitating processes, I think we could have been engaged as many as 100. But we do not have that many resources. But for the time being, we are engaged in some 20. And some of them are the conflict in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Nepal. And we were also heavily engaged in Sri Lanka for many, many, many years. And I think that the most successful Norwegian engagement so far has been over support to the peace process in Colombia. And I must say that I'm relieved and delighted to hear that yet another milestone may be within reach in the negotiations between the Colombian government and FARC by March 23. And that is, as you probably know, that's the date which the parties themselves have agreed on in order to see whether they will reach that milestone by that date. We have, during the Colombian peace process, we have seen that there has been a growing awareness of the gender perspective over time and a growing realization of its importance for the legitimacy of the process. One reason for this development is the impressive mobilization of women in Colombia. This has been aided by the fact that many of the leaders of social movements are women. In late 2013, a summit of women and peace was held. 500 women from all over Colombia gathered to promote the active participation of women in peace-building efforts and to provide input to the peace negotiations. They agreed on three points. First, to support the peace process. Secondly, to insist on the participation of women in all stages of the process. And thirdly, to advocate the inclusion of concerns relating to how the conflict has affected women. Pressure from civil society has been important, but the parties have also recognized that the inclusion of women is essential for the legitimacy of the process, both within Colombia and internationally. And in September 2014, the parties established a gender commission to include the voices of women and review the accords with a gender perspective in mind. The commission is made up of representatives of the parties themselves. In order to include the voices of the women, the gender commission invited several delegation of women to Havana. The direct participation both of victims and of women at the table has had an important impact. They have shared their experience on how the armed conflict has affected them. The women also brought concrete proposals to the table. For instance, they proposed that women must be part of decisions that affect the future, that women should be included in all aspects of the peace process, and that an inclusive language should be used in the peace accords. One concrete result of this, we can see in the mandate of the through commission. And the mandate states that the gender perspective should be fully integrated in the work of the commission. And that a special working group will be established within the commission with a view to ensuring this. The working group will assist in various tasks to this end, for example, organizing hearings involving women. Let me also make one point on reintegration. We have seen and we have experienced from other conflicts such as El Salvador and Guatemala that reintegration is challenging. Women in the guerrilla groups experience relatively equality with men in the field, but were expected to return to traditional gender roles after the peace agreements were signed. Reintegration programs should also allow women to reorient themselves and find new way of life. Ultimately, and this is, I'm sure we all agree on that, ultimately, the main challenge is the implementation of a peace agreement. A strong agreement is not enough on its own. Political will and the capacity to implement the agreement are essential. The international community has an important role to play in this. And then I would also like to touch upon some sort of additional points of inclusion. As we see it and as I see it, the main objective of a peace process is to create sustainable peace. In order to do so, it is vital to include all stakeholders. Women make up half of the population in most countries and in countries of conflict, by conflict, the proportion of women is even greater. The inclusion of women is therefore key to the legitimacy of the process. It is also important for people's confidence in their future peace. They need to see that the rights and needs of the whole population are respected and fulfilled and that this is not limited to what the varying parties consider sufficiently sufficient and necessary. Also, inclusion increases people's sense of ownership of their courts. It is also essential for securing and lasting peace and for ensuring the successful implementation of any peace accords. I said that I was going to touch on Syria and Afghanistan and I think I will leave that for the panel discussion. But I will conclude by saying some general thoughts of the importance of women in peace processes. 15 years after the adoption of the Security Council Resolution 1325, women are still severely underrepresented in official peace processes. In most negotiations, there are very few or no women in leadership roles. In recent years, only 9% of negotiators in formal peace processes have been women. Recent research suggests that the inclusion of women is not only the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do. And new evidence from Geneva Graduate Institute shows that when women's groups were able to effectively influence the process, a peace agreement was more likely to be reached and the agreement was more likely to be implemented. Another study involving a larger data set has shown that women's participation make it more likely that the peace agreement will be durable. Norway has likely United States and other countries have made their own national action plan on 1325, the Security Council Resolution. And we have, in our action plan, a specifically reference also to peace processes and peace negotiations. And we have two goals with our works related to that. First of all, to increase the participation of women. In this regard, strategic support to women's organizations in countries in conflict and promoting links to formal peace dialogues are important. And we are Norway. We are actually doing that. Second, to integrate the gender perspective in peace processes and agreements. Peace agreements are often the political and institutional foundation for the future of a country. It is therefore vital that they are non-discriminatory and inclusive. Thank you very much for your attention. Good morning. We will now hear from Jenny Bouvier and from the ground perspective. Thank you, Ambassador. I'd like to welcome you all here today for International Women's Day and give a special shout out to all of my Colombian women colleagues and the men who are supporting them as they are trying to have an impact on the process and find ways, some very creative ways, I think, to shape the future of their country. So congratulations to you all. And thank you also to both the women and the men in this room who have supported the efforts to move Colombia toward a peace process and to get peace in other countries around the world. I just want to mention Tonis Montes, who has been assisting me with this event, and recognize that she's really played an important role in bringing us all together. And I appreciate that. And of course, my colleagues on the panel. I'm standing here trying to stall a little bit for time because I think Ambassador Oss stole my notes. He basically gave the exact same talk I was planning to give. That is the role of women in peace processes and the status of the talks in Colombia, which was what I had planned to talk on. And he's done a brilliant job, I think, of bringing much information to the table. So I will try. This may seem a little bit incoherent, but it's partly because he said much of what was in my text. So let me see what I can do to pull this together. I think the first a couple of points. I think the first thing I would point out is that when you're talking about women and peace processes, every good academic needs to start by defining terms. And I think in the Colombian case, when we think of women in the peace process, there are a lot of different kinds of women who are working for peace in Colombia. And it's not just the women that are at the table. And that has to do with defining the peace process when we in the international community think about peace processes. We generally think about the table that is occupied mostly by men that is making the final declarations of the accords that have been reached. But I think we oftentimes overlook all of the many tables, the many peace tables that exist, where women are seated and are serving and are preparing and are cleaning up and are doing all of the tasks that make it possible to have a peace accord in the end. So I think I would just underscore that women's participation is based on many different multiple identities. And you have women of all different backgrounds, all different ethnicities, all different religions. You have women of the public sector as well as the private sector. You have women in the non-governmental community as well as women who represent women's organizations. You have in Colombia, particularly indigenous women, Afro-Columbian women who are struggling in areas, in zones where the conflict is strongest and the violence is the worst in the country. USIP has been working in the last year to support a group of women mediators. We started out with a project where we identified women from very different backgrounds to bring together to create a pedagogy of learning from one another. These are women we identified as having been engaged in mediation. And we didn't go in thinking, we're going to train them in how to do this. We went in thinking, what can they teach each other and what can they teach us? And how can we strengthen their efforts? And it was a very interesting experience in that this group has decided they want to be a Colombian network of women mediators. And they have begun to act as a collective. And it's a very interesting process. And I think a sign of the kinds of mediations and peace process initiatives that we're likely to see emerge in the coming period. The initiative of Colombian women for peace once observed, peace building is not centered on the individual will of the armed actors of the war, but must be understood as a comprehensive political, social, economic, citizen-based, and cultural process. And it's in this broader sense that I think we need to think about women's roles in peace processes globally, and in Colombia in particular. And here's where I overlap with Ambassador Oss's remarks about the role of women and the lack of women in peace processes. And I'll give a few more statistics to flesh out what he started to say. The United Nations has reported that of 31 major peace processes between 1992 and 2011, women were 9% of the negotiators, 4% of the signatories, 3.7% of the witnesses, and a mere 2.4% of the mediators. Now, their exclusion has implications for the content, for the process, and as he mentioned, for the legitimacy and the sustainability of the accord. I think perhaps as telling as the impact of participation of women in peace talks is also the consequences of women's absence from the table. Of 585 agreements signed between 1990 and 2010, only 92 even referenced women. That's 92 out of 585. The exclusion of women has similarly translated into a lack of attention to sexual or gender-based violence in ceasefire agreements and in peace accords. Negotiators refer to sexual and gender-based violence prevalent in many modern violent conflicts, including the Colombian one, as a war crime in only 18 of 300 or 8% of the post-Cold War agreements. Now, in Colombia, the jury is still out in negotiating. So we don't know exactly what the final accords will be, but the provisional agreements that have been reached, and there have been four of them reached so far, do allow for sexual violence to be considered as a crime against humanity. So this is a major advance, I think, in the Colombian process, and we're likely to see more similar kinds of engagement of issues around sexual violence and violence against women in the final accords. Now, the implications of gender equity and women's participation are very high. It directly impacts the quality of the peace. If peace is about establishing relationships of democracy, social justice, and equality, where each citizen has a voice and vote, a peace process is an opportunity to model these new relationships and to challenge former exclusionary practices. Gender equity is the first step toward reducing violence against women. It correlates positively with societies at peace. A 174-country study conducted by Harvard University confirmed that the greater the gender gap, the more likely the country will be engaged in war internally or with its neighbors. Women's presence at the peace table, where it has been achieved, is not only an issue of equity, but has contributed to better outcomes. A growing literature documents these roles. In Northern Ireland, Nobel Peace Laureates May Read, Corrigan, and Betty Williams founded the Northern Ireland peace movement that galvanized peace talks. When women were about to be denied a place at the peace table, they quickly created their own political party, the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, and one representation at the talks. Their participation broadened the peace agenda to include the needs of victims of violence, and we see this again in Colombia, political prisoners, and young people, as well as provisions for integrated education and housing. In Guatemala, the government and the insurgents each had one female negotiator. An additional official was formally designated to channel into the peace process the inputs from the women's sector of the larger civil society assembly. Through this mechanism, Guatemalan women secured language that provided protection for indigenous, labor, and women's rights, as well as guarantees for a balance of power between civilian and military authorities. In Liberia, when men reached deadlock in the peace talks, women surrounded the building in Acre where they were negotiating. The women refused to let the men leave until they had signed a peace deal, which was soon forthcoming. Peace accords in Guatemala, Burundi, Sudan, Darfur, and Uganda, all places where women participated in the making of these agreements stand out for their inclusion of gender-related content. Implementation, nonetheless, has been problematic when adequate mechanisms for oversight have been lacking. And again, I'll refer to the recent study by Tanya Paffenholz, which I highly recommend, making women count not just counting women, assessing women's inclusion and influence on peace negotiations, as well as Radhika Kumaraswamy's recent report United Nations High-Level Review on 15 Years of Implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. I contributed the study on Columbia to that document, and that will be available if you leave your email address, I'll send it to you for more detailed information on the Columbia case. These studies underscore the contributions that women are making to reaching better agreements sooner and to contributing to the longer duration of the agreements itself. Both of these studies, and much of the research now, is urging the alignment of international resources to make women's empowerment and engagement more effective in the peace-building stage. Now, in Columbia, women's engagement has not come without a struggle, and it's important to acknowledge this. In Cuba, where the parties are negotiating the peace accord now and have entered the final stretch, we have a chance to watch as the women work to engage in this process. Going back to my opening remark that we have to think about the peace process as a process, I think it's important to think about the period before the negotiations even take place, because that's where I think women really spent a lot of time preparing the terrain for a political solution to the conflict. This has been a long-time call since the peace talks broke down the last time in 2002. There were peace talks from 1998 to 2002, and when they broke down, it seemed that the military solution won the upper hand, and without women's groups and people trying to quietly create a consensus to build a consensus for a political solution, I think the peace talks wouldn't have come when they came. It's taken a long time. It's been 10 years. It took 10 years for the talks to start up, and I think every time you have a failed set of peace talks, the repercussions are that people kind of give up on peace, and they want to try something else. So we're in a good phase now. It's a phase where there have been four agreements reached on the different agenda items. The negotiators came up with a six-item agenda. There are two remaining agenda items. One is ending the conflict, and the other are the mechanisms for endorsement, implementation, and verification. The parties at the table have set out a March 23rd deadline for having a final agreement. Personally, I think this is not a realistic possibility, and I don't think it would be the worst thing in the world for it not to come to fruition on the 23rd. I believe there will be some sort of agreement. Perhaps a bilateral ceasefire will be formalized at that time, but I think it would actually be a real mistake to rush to the deadline. The rush is good in the sense that it's keeping people moving. The work is proceeding at a very, very dynamic clip, but there are many things that have yet to be resolved. And the issue of implementation I would just put out is probably the most important item on the entire agenda. It sounds like it's a technical issue, and it is a technical issue, but in fact, you can have the best accord in the world. But if you don't have a plan for implementation and if you don't have a plan for resolving the many issues of difference that will come up when you try to translate the written agreement into practice in the regions, if you haven't given considerable enough time to developing those mechanisms and having them really solid, you endanger the entire process. Because the legitimacy of the accord, as we saw last year, there was a rush to have an agreement on the victims in September. And Timochenko, the head of the FARC, and President Santos flew to Havana. They announced a big accord on victims. And a couple of days later it seemed clear that the agreement wasn't quite there yet. They really, it was a premature announcement and a premature agreement. And they spent two months going back and renegotiating what everyone assumed had already been done. So I would just counsel for my humble abode here at USIP that taking the time you need to really think through the implementation questions, I think, can only serve the process well. There are certainly limits to the patience of people. But I think that there is a need for education about how complicated these issues are and how much time it takes. And I would commend the negotiators on both sides, both the government and the FARC in Havana, for the work that they've been doing. I think they have taken an agenda of issues where there have been very dramatic disagreements on both sides. And they, through a process of dialogue and trust building, they have managed to move steadily and not slowly. I mean, if you think about how much time it takes to bring people around to a common point of view, they've taken the time that they need to develop really strong agreements. And I applaud their efforts. I think they will continue to go in that path and look forward to seeing what they come up with, hopefully soon. I'm not suggesting that they postpone for years, but I think that there is, this last period should not be underestimated in terms of the importance for the sustainability of the accords that will be reached. Just a word about the preparatory phase, and then I'm not sure how my time is, am I good? Just a little bit of the grassroots maybe, because I think some of the preparations that were done, there were a lot of very innovative negotiating processes going on on the ground with, for example, the Pacific Route of Women, the Ruta Pacífica de la Mujer, and the Women's Association of Eastern Antioquia, the Asociación de Mujeres del Oriente Antioquenio, which is known as Amor. We're negotiating local level ceasefires with armed actors in their communities that were sustained for periods of months at a time. There was one period where it was four months. They're very local areas, but women in Colombia are living in the middle of this conflict and have been for a long time. And they have to learn how to get medicines for their families, how to get food to feed their children. And sometimes there are military blockades or there are insurgents who are blocking their path to be able to fulfill the needs in their families, and they are negotiating to overcome those obstacles. In Arauca, Sur de Bolívar, Putumayo, Cauca, Montes de María, Magdalena Medio, Antioquia, and throughout, women have dialogue to release hostages, to prevent violence and displacement, to recover children that have been recruited by the armed actors, to protect their communities and to secure basic needs. They've navigated their way through occupied territories. They've persuaded insurgents to lift road blockades. They've escorted people through insurgent paramilitary and military checkpoints. They've documented, publicized, and denounced human rights violations when they've occurred. They've challenged the broader costs of militarization and violence and human rights violations. They've called for budget priorities that favor defense, that they've called for reanalyzing budget priorities that favor defense and security at the expense of other social needs like health and education. They've critiqued the lack of jobs, the lack of opportunities that leave their youth vulnerable to recruitment by the armed groups, to prostitution and to drugs. And they've sought solutions to the problems presented by Colombia's illicit economies. In the coca-growing region of Putumayo, which was the target zone for the US-backed Planned Columbia, women called for alternative development models, and they charged that the aerial fumigation of illicit crops was destroying the food crops, as well as the coca crops, contributing to greater poverty and hunger. Women have sought to keep the plight of victims and the impact of the war on civilian populations in the public eye and to build support that way for a negotiated settlement. Ruta Pacifica supported the diplomatic efforts of Senator Piedad Córdoba to lobby for a humanitarian accord. Córdoba played a critical and widely unrecognized role in opening communication between the FARC, civil society and the government in search of a political solution to the conflict many years before the peace process was announced. Others, like Marleni Orgüela, traveled to meet with armed groups to negotiate the release of military and police that had been detained by the FARC and the ELN from the jungles. She counseled, heart, reason and humanity are what are needed. We go with our heart, we go with our reason, and we try to touch their humanity. Women have increasingly articulated as well the particular impacts of war on children, women and more recently, LGBTI persons. They've raised awareness about the extent of sexual and gender-based violence and its impacts on the victims, their families and their communities. And in their efforts, women have both contributed to and drawn on international human rights and international humanitarian law as well as the norms, conventions and laws favoring women's rights. Now, if we turn to the table itself, because I think people, it's a place where you can count and much as we recognize the limitations of the numbers it's also a place that indicates the general level of interest in a gender agenda. So in the Colombian process, there were secret exploratory talks that took place before the actual talks were announced. And in those, three of the 17 participants that were engaged in the talks were women. This was back in February, between February and August of 2012. The numbers do little, however, to indicate the influence that those women had as part of the inner circle to create the agenda and the methodology of the negotiators at the peace talks. In those early exploratory talks, Elena Ambrosi, who was the director of the Human Rights Office for the Ministry of Defense, and Lucia Jaramillo Allerbe from the President's Office signed the resulting August 26, 2012 framework agreement as witnesses for the government. On the FARC side, one woman, Sandra Ramirez, served on the six-member exploratory delegation of the FARC. Of the four international witnesses from Cuba and Norway who also signed this early initial framework agreement, all of them were men. At the public launch of the Columbia's Peace Table in Norway three months later, men occupied all of the seats at the main table except one. That one seat was occupied by a Norwegian from the foreign ministry who moderated the press conference that announced the formal installation of peace talks. As the negotiators for each side of the table were gradually made known to the public, the Colombian women who had worked so hard to bring the talks into being in the earliest stages quietly disappeared from public view, but they did not disappear from their influence on the table. They continue to be working. The peace table, nonetheless, was largely shaped by the rules that were laid out in the August 2012 agreement. Participation at the table was allotted in the form of 10 seats each for the Colombian government and for the FARC. The table could include up to five plenipotenciarios, these are the plenipotentiaries who had full negotiating power at any time, and five alternates for a maximum of 30 total members for each delegation. This was later changed by mutual consent of the parties to a maximum of 40 members on each delegation. Initially, all of the 10 plenipotentiaries and alternates on the government delegation and all but one of the 10 on the FARC side were men. Tanya Niemeyer, also known as Alejandra Narino, nicknamed the Dutch gorilla for her roots, served as one of the five FARC alternates and played a key role as a FARC liaison with the international press. And perhaps I believe the only speaker or the only English speaker on the delegation. I met with her when I was doing research in Havana and I was interviewing some of these women and she saw me at a coffee bar and she came over and I started talking to her and I asked her about the English and she looked at me and she said, we've met before somewhere. And I said, I don't think so. And she said, no, I'm sure I've seen you before. And we figured out eventually that she was reading my blog in English. And so we had that connection and sometimes she has commented on my blog and she's offered translations of documents that I've had into Spanish. So she has tried to play a role, I think, in making what's happening in Cuba with regard to the peace talks known to the international community. Now the process started out as a very hermetic process and still is. It's a very protected process. It's not a process where there are internationals observing. There are basically the people who are at the table and the people who have assigned roles around the table and nobody else. Press comes in and out. Press is allowed to, with credentials and it's very difficult to get credentials. With credentials you're allowed to participate in the formal public presentations of agreements. But basically it started out with no civil society representation in the teams, at least on the government side. So the government team at the beginning included leaders of the military, police, and business sectors, which have been spoilers in the past peace processes. And I think this is for another conversation because I see a little bit of movement. I think my time is probably about to expire. But I think it's important to recognize that peace processes have a dynamic and the dynamic changes and the dynamic is susceptible to the actions of anyone who's involved in the peace process and those around it. So civil society and women's groups in particular have been just virulent about trying to put forth concrete agendas, specific action items, have tried to generate agreement around very messages that are very achievable messages. And Ambassador Oss has outlined the three that the Summit of the Women for Peace in Bogota in October 2013 agreed to. And I think they have been successful. They have said, we want you to stay at the table. We wanna see women included. And after the summit from a team of all men to women were named to the negotiating team, a sub-commission on gender was established. The sub-commission on gender, I would note, reviews all documents after the agreements have been made. And it's yet to be seen how powerful this will be. I think the more, probably the more influential peace has been the creation of, or the invitation of women's delegations and LGBTI organizations and victims organizations to Havana to participate in the talks. And some of that came through the women's sub-commission or the gender sub-commission. But I think the physical presence of women to interact with people at the table has been essential. And we've seen in other peace processes around the world that without the kind of interlocution, a defined channel for women's engagement, it's very difficult to have any kind of sustained impact from the outside. You really need that third party or that person who just really believes that this is important, who can go and lobby for it. And absent that, you have many women in many commissions and sub-commissions that are working groups that are defining what the agreements themselves will be. These are not women that represent women's organizations. These are women who have the smarts and the expertise in particular themes. And they don't see themselves there as necessarily representing women, but they do represent women. And they have at times been vehicles for women's inputs. I think with that, let's see if I wanna make any final commentary. Well, I would just say also that the peace agreements are not an end in and of themselves. They're an opportunity to begin changing patterns of relationships and patterns of inequity. And that's why it's so important that women are included in these peace processes because it's going against the tide. Left to their own devices or a society left to its own devices defaults into the norm of inequity, gender inequity. And so you really have to kind of step out of your comfort zone. And that's stepping out of your comfort zone for men and women. It's not easy for women, I think, to invade spaces that have been dominated by men for so long. And it's not easy for men to open the doors to the women. There's, I think there are many things that need to be negotiated that may be in the question and answer we can talk about. But I think the Colombian case offers us a really fascinating opportunity to accompany the women who are trying to make a difference, to accompany the men who are trying to make a difference, to see that the women are there as part of a team. I think that's what really has captured my attention so much. The women are working as part of the team. They're not working as women with their own interests. They're really integrated into the system. They may not be out front. And it's interesting if you go back and look at the photos, even of the launch, the women have the end spots usually. And when the press takes the photograph, they get the center. And the women, even when they're there, are eliminated from the photo. It's a very, very graphic image. But I think it's important to remember the women are there. And not to say there are no women at the table. I had actually the head of the FARC Gender Sub-Commission, Victoria Sandino said to me, it makes me so mad when people say there are no women at the table. I'm at the table, I'm working my tail off. And they don't see me. The women don't see me. And I thought that was a very interesting comment. So I think on this day of International Women's Day, let's call for us to recognize each other, recognize our contributions. And we'll be keeping an eye on Columbia and on the other peace processes and the role that women are playing around the world to make a difference. Thanks for coming. One of the things that many of these reports about women at the table do not really amplify is the people like Ginny Bouvier who really are treasures to the translation process. Sometimes they're individuals, sometimes they're countries like Norway. But it's critical that people not only linguistically translate the amazing work that has been going on at the grassroots level in Columbia, but are social cultural translators who tell the story almost as if an ethnographic process is underway. And certainly Ginny's last comments about what this is really about. It's an opportunity of societal change. And so Ginny, thank you for taking the time to really amplify these processes and tell the stories that we all need to hear because there are, as you have pointed out, hundreds of other conflicts that need this kind of dedication and persistence. So thank you both. Now I'm going to turn to my new colleague and old colleague as well, but new here at USIP to offer some commentary to the remarks made here this morning. Great, well I think I'll stay seated because we really wanna transform this into more of a conversation. First of all, I have to say it's a great pleasure to be here. Here, the US Institute of Peace with so many old friends like Nancy and Kathleen and Ginny here in this room and friends, I should say, like the government of Norway and the ambassador with whom all of whom I've worked for decades here in this room talking about this issue because I've worked with them on this issue for a really long time. And it feels a bit like coming home. My one proviso would be I do wish we had made more progress more quickly around issues related to women, peace and security. But I think we have made some important steps forward. So thank you for welcoming me home. And I should say I was listening to Ambassador Oss and thinking back to the first time I was introduced to the conflict and the women of Columbia and it was actually the most amusing if seen from a distance effort at mediation that perhaps I took on in a former incarnation with the Institute for Inclusive Security because we brought together a group of Colombian women from civil society, from government of all different types. And there was always an effort to bring together the widest possible group of people. And we started out with an interpreter so that we would work between English and Spanish with this group of people. And my Spanish is not very good. I understand it quite well, but my spoken Spanish is weak. So the women really, we all wanted to work more quickly than we were able to do with an interpreter. And so finally we said, okay, forget it, we're not gonna use an interpreter. I will speak in English and you all will speak in Spanish and we will work together in this way. And so we had a negotiation and a mediation of an agenda for women's inclusion. And that was literally so loud and multilingual that several people left the room. And in fact, we reached closure, but we only reached closure around what the agenda would be for women's inclusion. And this was in between the rounds of negotiation that we were referenced in the earlier comments by extending the conversation to the women's hotel room and the lobby because they had flights to catch, but they wanted to reach closure. And they were so serious about the approach that I finally said to them, you take it with you, it's now whatever time, three hours to your flight. You send it back to me. But remember, we are not negotiating the new constitution of Columbia. Little did I know fast forward that indeed that was one set of the seeds. And I won't say there's a direct line between the two, because there wasn't. But that was one set of seeds that led to the robust women's participation and influence on the peace process today. So it only makes me smile to see where we are. Fast forward to 2016. I think that, and others have spoken to the fact, so I think we have growing evidence, qualitative and quantitative, that we really need to shift the way peace is constructed in countries around the world. And when I started this off, there wasn't any quantitative evidence. I remember we brought everybody together and they said that women are so marginalized in peace processes around the world that there's not a quantitative case you can make. And today we've really made progress around that. We can quote facts and figures and some of those were mentioned today. We can cite peace processes around the world. We can look at those that endure and those that don't. And we know that this makes a difference. And really what we need to see as a broader transformation with Columbia is the most recent example of what we know to be true. And I think that we also see emerging some really common threads for how they make a difference in very specific ways. Moving beyond the question of whether women have a right to be involved in negotiations because it's obvious as a either half or majority of many of these war-torn populations around the world, they have a right to be there. But we know that they bring a larger perspective and a longer look. If we look at the way agreements are constructed around the world, we can see that women time and again are bringing issues related to reconciliation as they have in Columbia. We know that time and again, they're raising issues related particularly to reconciliation but particularly to reintegration but to the broader process of how you demobilize, disarm and reintegrate combatants and soldiers back into their communities for a whole raft of reasons ranging from their focus on their communities, their work within those communities, their role vis-a-vis combatants and their focus on the long term. We know that they're focused on refugee returns and refugee rights and how you do a transformative process around the rules and norms going into a post-conflict environment. And we know that they bring issues that are long-term issues within societies such as sexual violence to the fore. And we've seen time and time again and I could happily speak chapter and verse as could many of the folks in the room to how they raise these issues which otherwise wouldn't come into accords and wouldn't be highlighted in those accords. So those are some of the tangible ways in which they make a difference. They also are particularly adept at mediating. And I mentioned this and because it relates to some of the comments that others have made on the panel but also because it draws on my experience from USAID when we put together the National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security for the US government. And then we looked at where organic programs related to women's inclusion sprung up and what those women were doing. They were very, very often related to women mediating and they were very, very often related to women mediating at the local levels, diffusing the potential for the outbreak of violent conflict and moving the discourse into a space that was constructive and built a foundation for long-term peaceful cohabitation. And we see that, we saw that in Africa coming out in the horn in various places. We see that in Colombia. We had seen that previously in places like India and Nagaland. I saw it firsthand when I went to talk with Syrian women who are still mediating on the ground. It is a very common thread that emerges from the ways that women can build peace. And I spoke with one colleague at USAID about it in Kenya and I said, well, you've gone through these different rounds of a peace-building project there and each round has seen more women's participation. Why is that? And he said, well, because the project is better when we have the women participating and doing the mediating on the ground. And so there are certain themes that come through loud and clear and they come through loud and clear now over decades of analysis and study of the role of women in peace processes and they are once again proven true in the case of Colombia. And I think the challenge, and I wanna sort of conclude and I hope we can discuss this more within the Colombia context and more broadly in our discussion, the conclusion we need to reach is that we need to move from retail, that is one conflict and negotiation process at a time to wholesale. Where the configuration of peace processes is writ large transformed to bring in a wider range of voices. It's women, but it's not just women. It's other marginalized groups. It's LGBTI communities. It's indigenous populations. It's civil society writ large. We need to change the way we're constructing peace so that we're thinking about how we build accords in ways that create a real platform for inclusion in these societies moving forward. And we are cautiously optimistic that Colombia will offer us a successfully concluded peace accord that creates a durable peace. Gives us another case example of how we build an inclusive process. One way of doing it because there are other ways of doing it and if you look at the accords that Ginny was mentioning earlier, there are different strategies for doing that but that it creates that jumping off point to a really profound transformation in the way we think about peace building and peace negotiations and that brings in actors from across the spectrum to really ensure that peace accords and the process of negotiation create a foundation for sustainability. So I hope that gives us food for thought as we move into the discussion. Thank you. Thank you, Carla, and thank you for... I know that this audience is made up of many experts and I don't want to delay the Q and A a minute and if my question doesn't come up, I'm going to jump in. So I want the audience. We have mics and what I would like to do here is to get about three or four questions because we want to really get this into a discussion. If you could introduce yourself, stand up. Introduce yourself and make your comment or question very brief and we'll keep this moving quickly. Tonis, there's one here, one there. There's the first four. Thank you. Please stand up and introduce yourself. We are webcasting this so it's important that people get to see who you are. My name is Nadia, I'm a human rights activist from Jordan. Actually, we all know that women are always behind the screens of every peace negotiations everywhere in the world, but they are behind the screens. I mean, I used to do campaigns and I would put men as the names because I wanted this campaign to go on because I was more focused on the purpose, my goal, rather than, you know, but we have masculine societies in those parts of the world and those regions, you know, maybe Latin America or the Middle East. So I want to know the Western institutions, like when you were negotiated in Norway, you had more male representatives. They have to focus on giving those women more strength and empowerment to be, when you want to negotiate as, let's say, the US Institute for Peace, it should negotiate with women. You should empower women in many ways in their political role and civil society roles and stuff. Sorry. Thank you, Nadia. And the next one was back here in the blue. Okay, blue, and then blue. Good morning, my name is Jimena Uribe and I'm with International Cultural Events. I'm Colombian and I was wondering, I'm learning about what you do with different groups that come to Washington and get them involved, but how do you get the local community, the women local in the area involved with your project? Thank you. Back here in the Navy and then you, sir. Thank you so much for your comments today. My name is Rosalyn Warren, I'm from the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. You've touched upon some really important themes about durable peace processes, one that implementation is really challenging and important and that transformative peace is what we should be looking for. And so my question is about one of the most complex components of the implementation of the peace, which might be land restitution. People generally have challenges securing their land rights, women particularly do, even in times of peace. And so what is being done from where you sit from an implementation perspective to ensure that women in particular can secure their land rights as the peace transforms. Thanks Rosalyn, and here. My name is Paul Riggs-Rink. I have two basic questions. First, how are you encouraging women to become political leaders? Frankly, men don't want to be political leaders for fear of being killed. So you should be able to get at least 50 or 60% of the people who are politically leaders to be women. The second question is, how are you teaching women to earn more money? If they control the purse strings, they will be definitely more influential. So, and I don't mean education because that sort of, it doesn't teach them how to make money. I wanna know exactly how you're gonna teach women to earn more money. Thank you Paul. And we'll get one last question because it's in the front, okay. I'm going to turn it over to Ambassador Oz. I think the first question was really about what is happening behind the scenes but how can international organization and government step up on this issue? I think it was a very good question about women's empowerment. And I would say that what Norway is always trying to do when we are facilitating these dialogues or these peace processes is really to reach out to women's organizations, to reach out to civil society and really also try to do what I would say is competence building. But it's also, it also has to do with bringing experiences from other conflicts to the one we are engaged in. So let me give you an example. Very early on when Norway was engaged or when we commenced our support to the political dialogue in Afghanistan, it was important for us to really, as I said, to reach out to these women and to make their sort of voice heard in this, I would say, very masculine political society. So what we did then, what we did was that we brought women who had been engaged, for example, in Sri Lanka, in the peace process in Sri Lanka. We brought them together with women from Afghanistan and they exchanged views on what they have learned when they were engaged. And I think that that's one way, that's one way way to do it. And I also think that when we have been facilitating these processes, there is also a need, I would say, to raise question which is not obviously raised by some participating in the dialogues. And for example, when we were talking to Taliban and we all know their history, but I would say that we were able to convey to them why women were needed in the dialogue, why they should be listened to, but also by giving them examples from Norway and what women in Norway had been struggling on for centuries, I would say. And I would say that, so what we did behind the scene was actually, I think we politically matured the Taliban, but we actually also, I would say, had an impact on how the Afghan women were going to take, if not their positions, but how they should move forward in the dialogue, both with the Afghan government, but indeed also with Taliban. And last summer, I think that's, last summer, we brought representatives of the Taliban political commission from Doha in Qatar to Oslo. And at the same time, we brought Afghan women to Oslo. And I think that that was probably the first time the Afghans, Afghan Taliban and the Afghan women sat together and it was a first step in a process, but it is indeed a very, very important first step. And that also brings me to another point, which is important. And I think that when nations, governments, organizations like USIP, and when we are all involved, I think it's very, very important to understand that this is a long time effort. The Colombian process has been very successful in a few couple of years. But I think that what we have seen from other dialogues, like for example in Sri Lanka, we have been doing that for decades now. And I also think that there will be a long process in Afghanistan. I'm saying this because I have witnessed and I have experienced that sometimes governments have a very short time limit for what they want to achieve. And that's not the way to do it. I think it's very difficult to put a time limit when being supportive of these processes. And it also has to do with building trust. And I think some of us refer to that in the panel. You really have to build trust with those who want to assist and support. And without that trust and without that sort of confidence building, it's actually not going to happen. So, and my experience from Afghanistan is really, you have to devote a lot of time to sit there and drink tea and to talk, not necessarily about the political dialogue, but as building this relationship. And I'm sure also my colleagues who are assisting the peace process between the Colombian government and FARC are doing exactly the same. I'm not sure whether they drink tea, but they might be drinking other things. So that will be my comment on that one. Thank you, Ambassador. Jenny, I hope you'll talk to the local level engagement. Okay, I had a couple of comments first on the empowerment issue and how we from outside try to empower women. And I think it was very telling to me that in the first and second workshops that we had with these women mediators in Colombia, one of the most common comments at the end was, me descubro como mediadora. These women have been doing mediation for years and years and years, but they don't know that they're doing it necessarily. They don't recognize themselves. Society doesn't recognize what they do and they don't recognize it because there's no echo of support around it. And so I think the first step is really putting out on the table what women are doing and the value that it has, recognizing that it has value and helping the women themselves to recognize that it has value. And I think this is, I saw a huge leap with many of these women. Four out of the 30 told me that they were running for public office because of the workshops that we had done. That they felt that finally they had some support. They had other women who were doing the same kinds of things. I mean, they're looking in different directions to engage, but they're, in doing a conflict analysis and trying to figure out, well, how do you change things? How do you make a difference? Many women are saying you have to put yourself out there in the public realm and you have to do it in a public way. So I think that's important. I think building knowledge and helping them to understand the knowledge that they already have and to be able to identify it as something that is to be contributed to a collective is another step. Finding and creating platforms for them to be heard and for them to present their ideas. I think people who study gender relations or women in peace process even, I think often get very bogged down in trying to count the numbers. And the numbers are really hard to count. I mean, having tried to do it myself, they're very hard to count for a lot of reasons. One, because the teams keep changing, the women keep changing, the total number keeps changing and the specific number keeps changing. So it's hard to even calculate a percentage. I mean, we know that FARC women are some 40% of the rank and file. We know they're about a little bit less, like 47% of the delegations in Havana. That's a huge, huge number. But there's variation. And one person leaves from the table if you have 10 negotiators and one or two women, when one person leaves, that changes all your calculations. I mean, these are difficult kind of technical dilemmas. But the women who you talk to when you're in the process of doing that, when you start getting off on other subjects and say, well, what do you think of this new accord that was signed? I mean, they have their own ideas and they wanna be heard and they wanna be asked. And that's how you validate them. If people are asking them what they think, that means that they have something, it reinforces that they have something to say. If nobody asks them and nobody listens to them and nobody takes their ideas, I mean, I think what I've seen is that women have a lot of good ideas and all the people who have power, men as well as women, take the ideas and run with them. But the women who originated the ideas, often they have the power of getting their ideas into the mix, but the names doesn't stick with it along the way. They're sowing the seeds in the background, again, as you were saying in Jordan. We have some, in some cases, the women, we're funding a small project to work with men and women in 23 municipalities of Antiochia to develop gender-sensitive, non-patriarchal development plans at the municipal level. And this involves a whole range of men's group, men's discussion groups, women's discussion groups. It's actually a really beautiful alliance between a man and woman married. The woman is a feminist leader of many, many years of the oldest regional women's organization in Columbia. The man is very engaged at the municipal level in government and is a feminist. And the two of them form an amazing team because they have the women's organizations behind them, but they have the public officials who need to hear what the women have to say. And they've created a project that's been very interesting. We've also seen a number of local level initiatives, and this goes back to, I think, the role of internationals as being bridge builders. We have identified many projects and within this group of mediators themselves, many similar interests of women who are doing work on reconciliation, for example, or in one case, in particular, psychosocial support in one place. And they have a completely different methodology and other women in the network have invited this woman to go and give workshops in their communities. So we're kind of cross-fertilizing some of the experiences and lessons that we've seen in different places in Columbia. Now, just to pick up on a couple of the other questions, I won't go into great detail because we're limited on time, but USIP has a very, very, very modest grant or contracting program on Columbia. Our primary inputs really are technical advice. We are on the ground, we have very good contacts with a very broad sector of Colombian civil society and government. We have contacts within Havana and in the international community. With anyone who's been working on the peace process, we've tried to open our doors to all the knowledge that we have from other peace processes and all the knowledge that we've accumulated over time in the Colombian case and the many peace processes that Columbia has had previously as well. To bring that to bear on how to make the process succeed this time round. And that takes, it doesn't take a lot of monetary resources. It takes a lot of just intellectual resources and time and effort. And, but I would say that's kind of another way that the international community contributes. I think often the international community knows more about what's going on in a country that's geographically isolated by regions than people who live in one region and don't travel very much outside their region have. So we have a role as bridge builders to try to help put those experiences in touch with each other so they can leverage what they're learning and make it better. Great questions. I think on the issue of whether women come forward, I think part of it is, and I've seen this in a lot of places and you even enunciated it. It's a, you know, the women are really about the outcome and they're not really about themselves. And this is a generalization and this is often there will be men who are like this and there will be women who are not like this. But I think what's really important is the idea that you need to elevate the legitimacy, their legitimacy, their visibility and it's the obligation of those who are convening groups to shine a spotlight on the work of those women and their role to make sure that they appear in the photos, to make sure that they're endorsed and their added value is underlined on a consistent basis. And I think in that way you begin to see those things emerge. And I frankly think over the last decade we've seen a lot of progress in part because there's been a very intentional effort to raise the profile of women and their contributions writ large. I think with regard to the issue of engaging local communities, a lot of it is about both how you structure the peace process and the research and effort you put into bringing along local groups. And the onus is really on the parties involved in negotiation, whether formal or informal, to go out and look for the groups that have legitimacy, that can bring along audiences and that can broaden the tent for the negotiations. And a lot of it, a lot of what is really important to how those local groups play a role is about somebody facilitating them to come up with the concrete proposals to contribute to a peace process. And Ambassador Ross talked about this with regard to the role women played in Columbia but it's true writ large. Often there are women with very good ideas but they don't know how to label it or to speak in the language of the peace negotiations and to translate their concerns into constructive proposals that can be sort of redlined into a negotiated document or moved forward. And I think the other is we can't assume that the groups that represent different interests within a society, whether they're women's groups or others, are going to naturally come together in an easy way. They are representative of the parties in a conflict and they need assistance, mediation and facilitation to come together. They're very capable of doing that. They're capable of being constructive but they need that assistance as well. With regard to the issue of land restitution and land rights, I think it's a really critical concern and I think there's a window of opportunity often created when you have a process of negotiation that's coming to a close to really begin to translate that negotiated document into issues related to constitutional rights and legal rights under the structures of law within a given society. And land rights, inheritance rights, banking rights, rights to ownership, to vote, to have franchise within society more broadly are really important things that need to be thought of even before a document is finalized so they're then carried forward into the post-negotiation process so that they're codified. And then lastly, on these issues related to women's political and economic power, while there are some work that's going on at USIP and other organizations, really a lot of that work takes place within USAID and other development cooperation agencies that are really focused on elevating women's economic and political rights. And just late last week, I was sitting next to representatives of Albanian civil society who were talking about the fact that women are now 50% of the local government representatives in Albania, which I didn't know, but it's really that process of long-term transformation that you see happening in a number of countries to a greater extent in some ways than you see it in the United States, where women are starting to have a large plurality or 50% or majority of the voices within government at different levels and their economic power is increasing. I would recommend two things that relate to the last two questions. One is the World Bank's report on women's business and the law, which really codifies where there are disadvantages, male, female, and the way laws, rules, and regulations are structured to move forward, as well as the World Development Report they put together recently, which looks at a lot of those broader set of issues across different country contexts. Thank you both, and I think we have time for maybe three more questions and a very rapid summary from each of you. I'm gonna ask you to just turn off your mics because of the extra sound. All right, we'll go to the back of the room this time, so one, two, three, okay? Oh, four, you wanna do it this round, please. But would you stand? Hello, my name is Sarah Sebras from the World Bank, speaking on my own, the views on my own. I'm a lawyer, I was born in Columbia, and I commend you for your work. This is my dream as a little girl in a world where I had known not a day of peace and had seen several iterations of peace processes, give us hope and then bring those hopes down. I became a lawyer specifically because I wanted to negotiate a peace process and now actually in private sector project finance. But as a lawyer, I have seen the process of coming to an agreement of a signed document and also of various iterations of things that were thought to be agreed and warrant and the need to come back. So I have two specific questions, but I wanted to elevate a point of Columbia women since I have one in that since my grandmother's day, women are the neck of the household. We hold the first strings and we have a lot of influence power that is not the star power, but women's power is there. There's also an incredible group of educated women and my mother was one of the first MBAs in the country. I'm a lawyer, friends of mine are in public office and even the new political party, the Democratic center over 60% of the candidates were women. So there's been a lot of progress in the 60 years and I think one of the biggest criticisms of Colombian people of this particular process is that in the 60 years that there's been our engagement, there are a lot of us who have chosen the rule of law to advance issues of inequality and there's a great fear that there will be a return of aggression if there's not a mechanism to come together for conflict and peaceful negotiation. So many of us feels that the fart does not represent the populace anymore. The specific question is to Ms. Mouvier on the processes, you know what mechanisms are there for renegotiation or when there are questions of what one party thought was agreed and the other party has a different view. And then I was very keen, one of the various remarks of Ambassador Oz was how do we reintegrate women and how do we incorporate women who had leadership roles, who had a lot of power into a traditional society that expects them to do needlework or at best, do the nails or have a shop. I mean there are programs that are integrated women continuously but how do we take this very tough, very powerful women into the rule of law and the fabric of society? Thank you very much and thanks for your insightful commentary as well. To the back, could you just raise your hand because we're limited on time and we really wanna get your questions in. Thank you so much. Hi, thank you. My name is Megan Alpert. I'm from Foreign Policy Magazine and I was wondering, I think you guys made a really great case for inclusion in the implementation part of the peace process and I'm wondering if you can talk about inclusion of Afro-Columbian and indigenous groups and who have been calling for greater involvement and whether their relative lack of inclusion puts the implementation part in danger. Thank you. Thank you, Megan. I think over here was another one. Hi, my name is Kim McClain and I'm the Regional Director for Eastern West Africa and Latin America at PACT. First, I just wanna thank Karla for noting the peace program with USAID in Kenya. PACT has been a partner of USAID for that program for the past three iterations and I absolutely agree the more women, the better it gets. But my question is specifically around whether you can comment and I recognize without time, possibly not, but happy to leave an email and get a comment afterwards. Some examples that you've seen of women peace builders in Columbia addressing the distortions that prolonged conflict has caused in local economies, specifically in the industries that agriculture and mining. Thanks, Kim. And one last question and we'll wrap it up, unfortunately, but yes, right here. Thank you. Hi, I'm Maria Fernanda Sierra. I'm from Columbia as well. So my question is related to gender violence and domestic violence. So there's a very visible phase of, like a male phase of conflict, like in the combatant side. And on the other hand, there's a high burden of women specifically related to sexual violence and domestic violence that's less visible, but it's still part of conflict. So my question is thinking of post-conflict and the implementation plans, which type of elements will be needed to be included so that these elements are more visible and which mechanisms could be included to create awareness of these issues? Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, audience, for your insightful questions. And I'm going to turn to our panelists. I'm going to begin with Carla and Ambassador Oshe. We'll wrap it up. And if you can just briefly take one of the questions. We will bring this to a close. I think these are great questions. And most of the answers should go to the Columbia experts here, not me. But I think that the issue of renegotiating women in nontraditional roles is a really important one. We have seen in lots of places around the world where women who were real leaders were then pigeonholed back into traditional households, which created a lot of pressure within those households, a lot of dysfunction within communities and societies. And so it's really important that that issue of how you reintegrate into communities with different roles and a transformed roles of women and men is going to be a very important challenge and important to a durable peace. And maybe I'll stop there, except to just say in closing that what I really hope that we collectively can do is as folks who are interested in Columbia and folks who are interested in inclusive negotiations is build from this discussion and from the Columbia process to think of all these different pieces and use the piece of court in Columbia as a basis for a smarter way of building peace writ large. Well, I think we need to have another forum because the questions you've raised could take us for another couple of hours and they're very important questions and very interesting questions. I would just, I think I'd just like to maybe partially address a couple of them. First just to follow up on what happens to these women when they go back home. I think it's important to understand that many women join insurgent groups because they're looking for leadership roles and they see that they can have leadership roles. They don't always get them, but they seem to have more room to exert authority in a more gender equal environment in some cases and in some time periods. And I think we have to acknowledge that things change. War changes people, war changes conditions. It inverts social relationships, but I think that you could, from talking with the FARC commanders in Havana, it's very clear that they are playing a leadership role in their country and they value that role and they're valued for that role as negotiators. So what happens to these women when they come back? I mean, Colombian women have a hard time getting into public office. You know, the statistics at the local level are abysmal, they're around 10%. They're about double that at the national level for representatives and senators. But Colombian women who have not picked up arms have a hard time being elected to office. Imagine what it will be like for Colombian women who have been in the jungles for their adult lives going back and wanting to find a space at the table to make a difference. I think this is a tremendous challenge. And Colombia has many armed groups that have reintegrated into society and the women have not fared well. They have had an extremely difficult time. They've had hard time getting education. They've had a hard time with even getting anybody to take care of their kids. They've had a hard time going back to their households where the kids that they might have left when they went to the war have rejected them or the parents who don't like the fact that a woman picked up an arm and went off to the jungle might have disowned them. It's a very, very, very difficult situation and I think it will be a challenge. If you think about 40% of the FARC being women, how is this significant portion of ex-combatants going to be dealt with by the Colombian society? And then if you go beyond that to the culture in Colombia which is a culture of rejection of FARC, of the FARC. I mean, this is the enemy against whom a country has fought for 50 years. Transforming an idea of the enemy as terrorist into the enemy as fellow citizen and fellow citizenette. I'm not sure what the proper terminology is. But rethinking the imaginary of who these people are and how they belong to the society and claiming them as part of Colombia I think is going to be a long process and a very difficult process. So I've just mentioned that maybe just a couple of other notes on inclusion. The question of inclusion after Colombian and indigenous women I think is a really key issue and I think youth is the other key inclusion issue that I think has not been given sufficient attention at the table. And I've been, you know, a voice in the wind kind of hollering, listen to what's being said. The Afro-Columbians have many reasons to be concerned about a peace accord. Many more reasons to be concerned about a peace accord that hasn't addressed the concerns that they have. And the indigenous communities as well. And the indigenous movement, the ONIC, has started to say that they don't expect them to implement agreements that they haven't had a say in. And I think that's a legitimate position. I think the Afro-Columbian and the indigenous right now are calling for an ethnic subcommission similar to the gender subcommission that would have the capacity to review the provisional agreements before a final signature comes to the fore. And I think this is a reasonable request. And I think it would strengthen the prospects for approval of the peace accords. And it would strengthen the prospects of implementation of those accords, particularly in the areas where the violence has been heaviest, which oftentimes are heavily Afro-Columbian communities. So I'll just leave it at that. Thank you, Jenny, and finally, Ambassador Ross. Thank you. Thank you very much. And once again, thank you for inviting me to this conference here today. I would add three points. And the first one is that, first of all, I think we have to recognize that the Colombian peace process is a very successful one compared to many, many others. And that is also why I think that when the peace agreement is reached and when it's being implemented, I think that will be a lot to learn from that process, and which we can bring to all the peace processes where we are engaged and where we facilitate dialogues. And my second point is that Carla referred to a European country which has been good on gender equality in the public sphere. I would say that Norway is even better. We have 50% women or men in our government since the mid-80s. And we also have 50% as by law in our public boards. The reason why I'm mentioning this, and I think that also has to do with inclusion and social and economic development, we have statistically proven that integrating Norwegian women or women into public and private life has a much more significant impact than many of our, for example, over the whole energy sector. So that you can't compare Norway and Colombia, but you can use the fact that women are very important and they have a huge impact on the economy and that I'm sure has bearing for any country. So, and also to bring them into the political domain. And as I said, now we have Norwegian prime ministers, she's a woman and she has 50% women in the cabinet. And you can be sure that that will also be the situation in the future. So once again, thank you for inviting me and good luck with the peace process in Colombia to all of us, thank you. Thank you, Ambassador Austin. Thank you to all of you. And I think we can take away from this conference today that we have just begun this dialogue. I think the questions that have been raised and the lessons learned are global in nature. And one, again, we need people like yourselves, like Jenny, like Ambassador Austin, Karla, to help translate this to other, not just 20 conflicts, but hundreds of conflicts around the world. Inclusion matters, we need leaders, as the Nordic countries have shown us and we appreciate it. We need your voice at the table as well. So thank you all for your time, your efforts and have an excellent International Women's Day. Thank you.