The Courage to Gather

One thing that stayed with me was the closeness of memory – or cuimhne, in Irish - and the complexity of peacemaking and dialogue, trauma and identity.

Walking along the Falls Road and the Shankill Road in West Belfast with women carrying very different experiences and histories of conflict, resistance, displacement and organizing - from Palestine, Israel, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Ireland, the United States and elsewhere - the divisions and memories were still very present.

I was especially moved by the Palestinian and Israeli women engaging with that history, the challenging present moment, and with one another. In the moments between the rain and the formal program, they talked, asked difficult questions, and offered compassion and solidarity without pretending that their experiences, stories or political realities were the same. They were practicing another kind of leadership - not leadership as certainty, but as the ability to remain present in complexity: to listen without surrendering your own analysis, to recognize unequal and unjust realities, and still make space for another person’s humanity.

And for the Palestinian women in particular, what they carried into the room was not distant. It was immediate: military occupation, dispossession, settlement expansion, restrictions on movement, escalating violence in the West Bank, and genocide in Gaza. The scale of loss and insecurity is profound. That reality shaped the conversations, the questions being asked, and the meaning of gathering together.

The setting for the event was also significant. More than twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement, which largely brought an end to three decades of violence, Northern Ireland still gives us living histories and experiences to draw on. To reflect not only on how an agreement was reached, but what made political change possible, what has endured, and what remains unfinished.

Again and again, I came back to this: Peace - síocháin - is an ecosystem of actions.

This month marked 50 years since the Peace People movement began in 1976, following the deaths of three children in Belfast - Joanne, John and six-week-old Andrew, whose mother Anne was Mairead Maguire’s sister. For NWI, that history is personal. Mairead, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976, was part of Nobel Women’s Initiative for many years. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, she spoke publicly against the violence consuming Northern Ireland: “I blame all men of violence.” Out of that profound personal loss grew an extraordinary cross-community movement. Together with peace activists Betty Williams, Ciaran McKeown and thousands of others, Mairead helped build the Peace People - turning grief into organized, nonviolent action and refusing to accept violence as inevitable.

There was courage in gathering in the midst of pain.

Twenty years later, women confronted another barrier: exclusion from the formal political process. In 1996, women from different communities formed the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition. They did not simply ask for more seats at somebody else’s table. They created a political party, contested elections and won their way into the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement.

The documentary Wave Goodbye to Dinosaurs tells this story beautifully: women deciding they would be written into, rather than written out of, a pivotal moment in their country’s history. In doing so, it shows clearly that a seat at the table is not the same thing as power.

Women need constituencies behind them, movements around them, strategy, resources and collective strength. Sometimes they also need to create new political spaces when existing ones will not let them in.

These histories raised questions for the women with us. Where does political power come from when formal politics feels closed, discredited or profoundly unequal? What can women build outside existing institutions? How can dialogue create political possibility without becoming a substitute for rights, justice, accountability and changes in unequal power?

We heard another story of organized resistance. In 1999,  just a year after the Good Friday Agreement, arms manufacturer Raytheon opened a military software facility in Derry, promoted as part of the economic investment that would follow the peace process. For local activists, the presence of one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers in a city emerging from decades of violence carried a stark contradiction. Through years of organizing, protest and direct action, activists, two of whom were in the room, helped force its closure. The message was simple: their peace dividend would not be weapons.

That story also opened a wider conversation about the political economy of peace: who holds resources, who benefits from the status quo, who gets funded to “do peace,” and what incentives exist for political leaders to change it.

Ann Patterson, a peace activist from Northern Ireland, put it simply: we need to elect people who genuinely want peace, not people who want to make money from the machinery built around peace.

For me, that is a feminist question too. Where does power sit? Where does the money go? Whose expertise counts? And how much reaches the women and communities doing the slow, often invisible work of sustaining change?

At the very beginning of the gathering US Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal travelled to the small, remote village on the northeast coast of Northern Ireland where we were staying to spend an evening with the group. She reflected on her own journey from grassroots immigrant-rights organizing to elected political power.

“Don’t let your vision be limited by what someone else tells you is possible,” she told the women. She spoke about challenging our own political spaces, not only those of our opponents, and about the danger of women gaining visibility without gaining collective power.

That felt particularly relevant: representation matters, political participation matters, but neither automatically produces power.

I found myself thinking about my visit to the West Bank last year as part of NWI's delegation, and the Palestinian women human rights defenders and organizers I met. What stayed with me was their agency: braving checkpoints, documenting violations, defending rights, supporting communities, organizing under immense pressure and refusing to disappear from public and political life.

Women build power through many forms of action - some public and confrontational, some quiet and sustained, some inside institutions and some far outside them.

Political agreements can transform what is possible, while trauma, segregation, inequality, memory and contested identities remain. The work continues long after people leave the negotiating table.

For the Palestinian and Israeli women participating in the Futures Lab, none of this produced easy answers. The leadership challenge was not simply how to “bridge divides,” but how to build political agency without erasing history, justice or unequal power. How do movements keep going when political progress feels impossible? How do women build collective power rather than simply seek inclusion? What pressure is needed outside institutions, and what leadership is needed inside them? How do we create space for dialogue while upholding justice and accountability? And what political and economic interests stand in the way of peace?

Perhaps that is where misneach - courage - comes in.

Courage as the willingness to keep organizing. To challenge your own side as well as your opponents. To sit with contradiction. To question your own assumptions and biases. To recognize power and inequality rather than smoothing them away. And to keep creating political space where none seems to exist.

For those who have endured injustice and violence, entering dialogue across profound mistrust and unequal power - without normalizing oppression or surrendering truth - is an immense act of courage. The courage to gather across differences, movements, histories and generations. To build political power - not because agreement is guaranteed, but because refusing isolation is itself a political act.

Fifty years after the Peace People took to the streets, that may remain one of the most important lessons.

Refusing to accept that violence is inevitable is not a passive act. It requires political imagination, organizing and collective power.

Peace is an ecosystem of actions. And sometimes, gathering itself is resistance.