Norway’s Foreign Minister, Ine Eriksen Søreide, was honored at an evening reception at IPI on March 14th during the annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) gathering at the United Nations. Foreign Minister since October, 2017, Ms. Eriksen Søreide is the first woman to occupy the post, and in her remarks, she emphasized why she thinks that women’s participation in peace processes is so important.

“It is about building resilience, it is about making peace, and it is about making peace last,” she said. “Those three factors are very important, and for all of those to happen, women have to be part of this, fully integrated, from the beginning to the end.”

By way of example, she mentioned Norway’s involvement in the peace process in Colombia. “Norway is one of the guarantor countries,” she said, “and what we did was try to, from the beginning, integrate women into the whole process, and this guided our diplomatic efforts.

“I wanted to make a very particular point of this,” she said “because it’s easy to think that this is about women as victims, but it is not only about that, it is also about women as community leaders. Bear in mind that the peace process in Colombia was partly driven forward by women’s organizations and civil society organizations.”

Looking out at the large crowd that filled the room, she said she was pleased to find so many men there. “It is of vital importance that we engage men,” she said, “and I think it is even more important to engage young men, and the reason I am saying that is where we see across the world today that women’s rights are under immense pressure, is mostly in areas where young men are getting increasingly marginalized.”

She noted that while most people ascribed Norway’s wealth and economic growth to its oil, there was, in fact, a more compelling argument for this audience. “The most important thing is having women as part of the work force,” she said. “That accounts for a larger part of our GDP than oil does. So that is a bit of a lesson to everyone. To include women in the work force produces more economic growth, which leads to less marginalized groups in most regions and countries, and that is a win/win situation.”

Prior to her current job, she was the minister of defense, the third woman in a row to fill that post, and she recounted with some delight a happy consequence of that fact. “We’ve had female defense ministers – no female foreign minister until now – but so much so that young girls had a tendency to ask – and they’ve asked me several times– ‘Can a man be minister of defense in Norway?’”