Women play a crucial role in building peace at the grassroots level in Myanmar, even if they are not represented adequately in the formal peace talks.
UNSCR 1325
Eighteen years later, the "gender perspective" required by Resolution 1325 has fallen short of its transformative potential. Peace practitioners must turn their gender lenses inward to examine their own cultures and practices as potentially part of the dual problems of gender inequality and insecurity.
In the case of Bougainville, women leaders emphasized their peacebuilding role in the conflict, drawing on both local customs and norms—like their “maternal responsibility”—and global norms enshrined in UNSCR 1325 to buttress their participation in peace work.
Planning staff in EU peacekeeping and crisis management missions maintain traditional understandings of security as a gender-neutral domain in relation to which “gender issues” are seen as an afterthought—not as essential to security work itself