This event is co-hosted with the Women’s International Peace Centre and launches the second edition of their Feminist Peace Series magazine. The Feminist Peace Series was born out of the continuous inquiry into what Feminist Peace means in practice intending to showcase the different transformative approaches to peacebuilding. In the 1st Edition of the Feminist Peace Series, The Peace Centre shared various understandings of Feminist Peace with perspectives from practitioners, partners and colleagues in the field of peacebuilding.
The 2nd edition focuses on how women and, in particular, feminist peace activists are responding to the direct and indirect consequences of Covid-19 and elaborate on the practical and theoretical implications for feminist peace. With Feminist Peace Series, we hope to continue building a community of diverse contributors and readers that value activism and that understand feminist perspectives on peacebuilding.
About the speakers:
- Margaret LoWilla (@_lilowilla) is a Programme Officer at the Women’s International Peace Centre. She has vast experience in the field of Leadership, Peace, Security and Development. She is also a researcher and writer, documenting stories of Africans from their own lived experiences, highlighting their resilience and centering their agency and innovation. Her works are featured in the Young African Leaders Journal of Development, ALC Covid-19 Op-Ed Series and Covid Stories from East Africa and Beyond: Lived experiences and forward-looking reflections, published by Langaa Research and Publishing.
- Saba Hamzah (@Saba_Hamzah) is a Yemeni poet, writer, and educator based in the Netherlands. Her main devices are line and light and the moments in between. Saba's work questions power structures of societies at large using art and literary interventions as tools for social mediation and transformation. Her scholarship activates silences in living archives of women in the conditions of diaspora and exile. Saba has been working on a collection of photo-poetry, Landless: Our Shared Heaven (2015-present). This collection examines the interplay of power relations through social mobility issues of state borders, exile, displacement, and deal with themes of war and death, in their many forms. You can find more of her work on her website.
- Sharon Eryenyu (@ShaRown_VII) is an African Feminist and Content Creator with a keen interest in women and girls’ human rights. She is most satisfied by socially conscious engagements that impact people’s lives positively and envisions a society where the ideals of feminism are valued in such a way that women fully embrace their autonomy and agency, build their leadership capacity, and tap into their power. Some of her featured articles can be found in the first edition of the Feminist Peace Series Magazine. She is presently the Communications Officer at Women’s International Peace Centre.
- Juliet Were (@WereJuliet) is the Deputy Executive Director of Women’s International Peace Centre, where she has led research and training for women to amplify their voices and advocate for policies and programmes tackling the impact of conflict. She has co-authored ground breaking research on women’s rights in situations of armed conflict and post-conflict in Africa and Asia. Juliet has coordinated physical and psychological rehabilitation programmes for war survivors in Uganda, Liberia, South Sudan and Kashmir. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Uganda Women’s Network and as an Advisor to Global Fund for Women.
- Chair: Louise Arimatsu (@larimatsu10) is Distinguished Policy Fellow in the Centre for Women, Peace and Security, where she works on the ERC project 'Gendered Peace'. Her current research projects include 'A Feminist Foreign Policy' and 'Women and Weapons'.