From Regional Dialogue Conference “Towards inclusive peace: Women and gender approach in peace processes and reconciliation” on 11 December 2020

Conclusions and Recommendations

From Regional Dialogue Conference “Towards inclusive peace: Women and gender approach in peace processes and reconciliation”

On 11 December 2020, online, organized by RWLSEE with support of UN Women and Swedish Government

On Building Inclusive Peace

• Broaden the definition of peace to include women’s perspectives on peace that resolves and secures socio-economic needs of citizens and not just ending violence. Gendering peace is essential and leads to sustainable peace.

• Ensure gender inclusive peace as a strategic investment to lasting peace. Science shows valuable evidence in support.

• Ensure equal inclusion of women in formal peace processes where decisions are made on peace and future. This including ongoing international peace processes in the Balkans, and in particular the EU mediated Kosovo- Serbia dialogue on normalization of neighborly relations. Women can not be forever at track 2 or 3 of peace processes. Women’s courage and capacities in responses to conflict resolution should be translated into women’s rights to be equal with men in deciding on peacemaking.

• Ensure gender equality provisions in peace agreements by adopting legal obligation of peacemaking frameworks, as a way of guaranteeing that women play a central role in peacebuilding.

• Consolidate the understanding of relationship between women’s presence in peacemaking processes, women’s rights and gender provisions in peace agreements that would enable women’s meaningful participation in post-conflict governance and peacebuilding;

• Promote the culture of inclusive peace among society and institutional thinking to consolidate an understanding that including all groups from all walks of life and, particularly women and youth, leads to lasting peacemaking and peacebuilding

• Support local peacebuilding, local movements and actors, as a key to overall peacebuilding

• Build capacity and enhance advocacy for women’s inclusion in peace agreement negotiations and ensure better publicity for the achievements of women in the peace and security sectors and promote positive examples and achievements

• Ensure that women’s access to peacekeeping missions and, especially, in conflict-prevention and conflict-resolution negotiations becomes more structured and systematic.

On Transitional Justice for Peace and Reconciliation

• RWLSEE adopted “WPS and Justice” agenda to ensure justice serving to both goals: to build a just society and, to address post-war reparations and reconciliation with special focus on redressing and seeking international justice to women victims of rape during wars in Balkan, and for perpetrators to not go unpunished.

• Establish international justice for women victims of war rape during the wars in the Western Balkans, namely in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Croatia, paves the way to peace and reconciliation. This tragic issue cannot be kept hidden anymore and perpetrators cannot go unpunished.

• National Governments should assume a leading role in taking measures to provide justice to the many victims of war in their countries.

• National Governments should ensure that crimes of sexual violence committed during the conflict are thoroughly investigated and prosecuted with adequate provisions for the support and protection of witnesses before, during and after proceedings.

• Ensure that national laws on war victim applies equally to women victims of sexual Violence in wars. Although their status is recognized, they must enjoy the same benefits as other war victims.

• Compensation to the families of war victims should not delay.

• Implement the process of reconciliation with the past of wars and tragedies of genocidal level in Balkans (1990-1999); there cannot be peace without justice; consider apology for genocide as a means of reconciliation.

• Support reconciliation processes through expanding dialogue among women from art, culture, academia, media and other relevant sectors that allows at looking on peacebuilding in a different light.

On Art, Peace, and Reconciliation

• The role of art in promoting peace and reconciliation in post-conflict societies is significant. It can help restore victims’ capacities to participate in reconciliation processes, access their emotions and individual healing processes, while helping in rebuilding of relationships and trust-building in societies previously divided by conflict, and laying the groundwork for long-term and sustainable peace.

• Support projects which promote the role of women artists in peacebuilding and reconciliation, ans as a contribution to implementation of the WPS agenda by non-traditional actors

• Follow up with ‘the art and reconciliation dialogue’ with next event to be held in Italy, within the Rocca Malatestiana Festival in Fano

• design the concept of the exhibition on ‘Art, peace and reconciliation’, which will be a presented in seven focus countries and Italy

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RWLSEE is a unique regional women peacebuilding organization founded in 2006. Our mission is to empower women and promote gender equality in politics, decision making and peacebuilding and formal peace processes and to promote peace, stability and European and Euro-Atlantic integration of the all six countries of Western Balkans. RWLSEE holds that more women represented in the relevant peace and political processes brings better and more sustainable results. Its membership are high profile women from politics, parliaments, governments and civil society from seven-member countries Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia.

www.rwlsee.org