Who’s missing in the peace process?

Over the last few weeks, Geneva has been back in the spotlight. The city hosted talks on how to stop the conflict in Ukraine and talks on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

All these talks aimed, we fervently hope, at achieving peace. All of them also led by a few men in suits.

It seems to be a recurring theme; the days when peace negotiators like Staffan de Mistura, trying in vain to end the conflict in Syria, insisted on the involvement of Syrian women, seem long gone. When American president Donald Trump recently unveiled his new Board of Peace, the group photo was so male dominated it looked like a reunion of ageing former fraternity boys.

Whatever happened to that once obligatory phrase among seasoned diplomats, that a peace process has to be inclusive, and involve all “stakeholders”? Leave aside the awful jargon, the point is important; how do you create a sustainable peace when the people who have to live with its consequences are not involved?

On Inside Geneva we talk to two peace experts, both women, who have concerns, but who also offered some answers which surprised me.

Listen to this week’s episode:

What is peace exactly?

Sara Hellmüller, professor of international relations and a specialist in peace studies at Geneva’s Graduate Institute, agrees that “women are completely absent in high level politics at the moment, and in this high level peace-making.”

But she also points out that creating peace very often has to start with those doing the fighting, and they remain, by and large, men.

The problem, she warns, is this can lead to a very narrow definition of what peace is. She makes a distinction between what she calls “’negative peace’, and ‘positive peace.”

“Negative peace would be the end of violence,” she explains. “And positive peace would mean longer term sustainable peace, so not only the end of physical violence but also some form of good governance in the long term.”

Hiba Qasas, the founder of Principles for Peace, a Geneva based organisation aimed at defining principles for effective and lasting peace, points out that the absence of women in peace processes is “systemic…Traditionally we’ve seen that there’s been low representation of women as mediators,” she tells Inside Geneva.

Continued aspiration for peace

So what do these two women make of the new Board of Peace? Here’s where I got a bit of a surprise. “It could have been worse,” says Hellmüller, “imagine he {Donald Trump} didn’t create a board of peace but a board of war? I think it shows that peace is still something that world leaders aspire to.”

Qasas, who is Palestinian, welcomes anything which might bring some relief. “The fact that President Trump initiated and pushed for a ceasefire in close collaboration with regional partners is a positive step in the right direction,” she says. “But I still have a lot of questions about it.”

She shares Hellmüller’s concern that the current crop of besuited male mediators have a narrow, and perhaps very short term, perception of what peace actually is. “At best, we’ve been successful as an international community at achieving a series of ceasefires. But where we fail is in sustaining peace, or preventing conflict, in many cases.”

Nevertheless, her view on the lack of women in peace negotiations is more nuanced than I had expected. Simply including them will not suddenly make things better, she suggests. The emphasis on inclusivity, which became de rigueur in the 1990’s, and is only now declining, can end up being “a bit of a ticking the box exercise.”

That doesn’t mean Qasas or Hellmüller are happy with the current situation. Qasas points out that in 2023, the proportion of women on peace negotiation teams was just 10%.  Hellmüller believes we are seeing “a shift away from comprehensive peace-making” towards a process “just focused on the main belligerents, and mostly on male military actors.”

No blueprint

Is there a recipe for successful peace-making? The fact is, many peace negotiations do not succeed. A third of peace agreements, Qasas points out, “go completely unimplemented.”

But she warns against assuming there is a blueprint for a good agreement. “I don’t believe in blueprints. I don’t believe in tool boxes.  I believe that peace is a much broader concept than political peace, and it needs to be felt and experienced by the people.”

We come back to Hellmüller’s original point; real peace is much more than the absence of war. To make a peace agreement stick, those who have to live with the consequences of any peace agreement need to be involved.

“Peace,” she says, echoing Qasas, “needs to be felt and experienced by the people, and they determine how that translates into their daily lives.” That’s another reason for including women, because the women of Gaza, or Ukraine, will have to live, daily, with the consequences of the decisions primarily made by men. Will those men think rebuilding hospitals should take priority over businesses? Will it be important to demine the paths children walk to school as fast as possible?

It’s a fascinating discussion, so join Inside Geneva to hear it in full. But before we despair at the constant news headlines showing men in suits shuttling across Geneva in limousines, Hellmüller points out that those images are only part of the picture.

“Women are still working for peace every day in different conflict contexts,” she says. “They are still involved in peace processes. Maybe not the kind of transactional peace making, deal making level that Trump is engaged with, and that the media focuses on mostly, but these activities have not just stopped.”

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