Tuesday, October 22nd, from 9:00am to 5:00pm EST
The Gender and Peace Operations Research Conference
The Gender and Peace Operations Research Conference will convene practitioners, researchers, and uniformed personnel from different regions and backgrounds to present and advise on each other’s research projects, improve coordination on research, and build a global community of practice.

The conference will take place as part of the partnership between IPI’s WPS team and the Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Operations (led by Global Affairs Canada), which aims to increase the meaningful participation of uniformed women in UN peace operations. IPI WPS will host this conference to enhance research findings, promote complementarity and collaboration among researchers, and provide a platform to hear from scholars and practitioners outside the Global North, as well as identify thematic gaps within the field of gender and peace operations. In this vein, panel discussions will explore topics related to gender and peace operations, including gender-responsive leadership, mission effectiveness, masculinities in peace operations, barriers to women’s participation in peace operations, and roles, responsibilities, and trainings for peace operations.

This is a closed-door event. If you are interested in participating, please contact Phoebe Donnelly ([email protected]).

Recommended Reading:

• All of IPI’s publications under the “Gender and Peace Operations” workstream can be found here >>

Wednesday, October 23rd at 1:00pm EST
Building Bridges for Nonviolent Change: The Role of Women as Insider Mediators
This public policy forum will be an opportunity to expose multiple stakeholders in New York to the crucial work of women as informal bridge-builders in conflict situations, and to discuss strategies for including their expertise in formal mediation processes. At this event, the Berghof Foundation will be launching research reports and a policy brief on the role of women mediators in recent protests in Venezuela, Thailand, and Iraq. These reports offer specific and actionable recommendations for how international donors and practitioners can fulfill capacity building and support needs to empower these women to sustain and deepen their engagement, thereby expanding the potential for achieving peaceful change and conflict transformation. This policy forum seeks to expose member states, UN officials, and international civil society to new methods and approaches to envisioning women’s inclusion and impact in formal peace processes.

Recommended Reading:

• Mediation is Failing; the WPS Agenda Has a Way Forward
• Can FemWise-Africa Make Mediation Work for Sustaining Peace?
• Full, Equal, Meaningful, and Safe: Creating Enabling Environments for Women’s Participation in Libya
• At the Nexus of Participation and Protection: Protection-Related Barriers to Women’s Participation in Northern Ireland

Thursday, October 24th at 1:00pm EST
National Action Plans for National Challenges: Addressing Environmental Crises through the WPS Agenda
On the margins of the annual UN Security Council open debate on Women, Peace and Security, the International Peace Institute (IPI), in partnership with the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, will convene a hybrid policy forum on “National Action Plans for National Challenges: Addressing Environmental Crises through the WPS Agenda.” In recent years, the WPS agenda has expanded to include issues outside of “traditional conflict,” such as climate change and environmental disasters. As the agenda has evolved, this expansion has become a key part of contextualizing and applying WPS principles and priorities in different countries. As a way of implementing the agenda, NAPs should be tailored to a specific country’s context, and integrating disaster risk reduction (DRR) and/or climate dynamics broadly can be a powerful way to make an NAP relevant to a country’s internal dynamics. In this vein, this event seeks to map out and explore how the WPS agenda has been expanded to include climate and environmental concerns and how different member states are contextualizing these issues within their NAPs.

Recommended Reading:

• How Can Climate Considerations Be Better Integrated into the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda?
• Dissolving Interagency Silos: The WPS Agenda on the Disaster-Conflict Continuum
• Looking Beyond Conflict to Address Climate Change Impacts in the Women, Peace and Security Agenda