It is the end of June, a month marked annually in some parts of the world as Pride month, when LGBTIQ movements and people are celebrated, when inequality is protested, and the continuing struggle for equality has a global media megaphone.
While the spotlight shines specifically on LGBTIQ people and the challenges they continue to face, the month, and the issues it spotlights, are pertinent for women too.
Our Sudanese sister, Roya Hassan, passed away suddenly and tragically on Friday, 2 June, 2023. Roya was a member of Nobel Women's Initiative's Fall 2021 cohort of the Sister to Sister Mentorship Program. Roya proudly identified herself as a person with a disability, bravely navigating life with multiple sclerosis (MS), and was our sole sister who actively focused her feminist work on making visible the unseen lives of women with disabilities in Sudan and throughout the global South.
In June 2022, only a few months after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, laureates Jody Williams, Tawakkol Karman and Leymah Gbowee travelled to Krakow in Poland and Lviv in Ukraine to express solidarity with Ukrainian people, and to hear about the challenges and priorities of women as they faced the brutal war. Some of what they heard was documented in Oh, Sister!, a powerful documentary about six women and their fight for peace, justice and freedom in Ukraine.
Almost a year later, Nobel Women’s Initiative went back to Ukraine to show the film at the Bucha Journalism Conference, where reporters from Ukraine and abroad discussed the complexities, responsibilities and ethical challenges in reporting on war.
The world has long been plagued by conflict and violence, and traditional approaches to peace and security have failed to provide effective solutions. This failure has been particularly acute in the Global South, where local communities are most affected by conflict and violence but often lack representation in high-level policy-making discussions. This lack of representation of local peacemakers and particularly women has left many voices unheard and has limited the effectiveness of traditional approaches to peace and security.
Technology is increasingly shaping our world. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technologies, affecting everything from where and how we work and live, to tackling the world’s most pressing issues, such as climate change and social injustice. As the sector continues to grow and to affect ever more areas of our lives, we have to recognize that it has implications for gender equality and human rights more broadly, and we need to reflect on the question – where are the women?
On Friday, 17 February 2023 at the 2023 Munich Security Conference, Leymah Gbowee was asked to provide the first comment from the audience after panel discussion entitled Against Lawlessness: Ensuring Accountability.
In 2015, I was selected out of over a thousand applicants to represent South Sudan and the entire African continent in Nobel Women’s Initiative's Sister-to-Sister mentorship program. I was among three sisters in the program - Neesa from Honduras, Teteh from Myanmar, and myself from South Sudan. I didn’t know that what I was doing for my country was noble, until I got into the program and was rubbing shoulders with the most powerful women in the world - the Nobel laureates. That made me appreciate how powerful I - a poor girl from a small village in South Sudan – was.
When the conflict broke out in South Sudan on 15 December 2013, everybody was devastated. Many people lost their lives in a senseless war. Like any other conflict in Africa, the majority of those affected were women and children. They were displaced everywhere, in refugee camps, and thousands are still in Protection of Civilian Centers across the country. After years of tragedy we finally claim to be in peace. With international influence and pressure from neighboring countries the parties to the conflict accepted to engage in dialogue and signed several peace agreements.
I am a young woman from South Sudan, also known as the world’s youngest nation, which is still in a process of building our democracy after years of protracted conflict. I am passionate about my country's future, and confident that inclusion of women, especially young women, in the nation-building process is crucial to achieving sustainable and prosperous peace, and a strong democracy. With our first general election coming up, now is the time to take action.
Four decades after the million person protest march in New York against the build-up of nuclear arms, and 25 years after the signing of the Landmine Treaty in Ottawa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams amplifies the call to stop the proliferation of these terrifying weapons of mass destruction as the world faces the heightened possibility of a nuclear attack by Russia.