NORGLOBAL-Norge - Global partner

This project investigates womens participation in local governance and politics in Northeast India and Nepal, focusing on women's participation in peace processes. The project examines women's equality in conflict and post-conflict contexts. We look specifically at the understanding of concepts such as gender equality, empowerment and political participation. Post-conflict settings like Nepal have received a lot of attention in research on womens participation in peacebuilding. The focus has primarily been on the situation of women and measures for equality prescribed by international organizations. On the other hand, gender perspectives have been rather peripheral in the study of armed conflict in India. In other words, there is still a lack of research on women's contributions to peace processes as well as conflicts in India. Nor have studies of gender and conflict in India been central to international research on women and security. This may be because Indian conflict researchers tend to use a conventional security perspective. Conflict resolution also tends to involve negotiations behind closed doors, without civil society participation. However, research on women's participation in Indian peacebuilding is important because it provides the opportunity to reflect on the cultural and political premises of the liberal peacebuilding paradigm of multilateral organizations, and the use of women's participation as a key objective for democratic state-building. Our research shows that one should not take for granted the positive effects of women's participation in peacebuilding. It is also important to question how to strengthen women's equality in conflict areas, and whether this can be achieved through the peacebuilding templates currently promoted by multilateral agencies, often perceived as culturally inappropriate and dogmatic. This project is a collaborative effort by PRIO and six partner institutions in India and Nepal: Malaviya Centre for Peace Research (MCPR) at Banaras Hindu University, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, WISCOMP (New Delhi), the North East India Studies Programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Omeo Kumar Das Institute for Social Change and Develo pment and Nepal Centre for Contemporary Research. Through coordinated research including fieldwork and workshops, the project investigates how women might be empowered by engaging actively in peacebuilding, whether in the context of protracted conflict or in a post-conflict setting. Two target group workshops have been organized since the project started in July 2012. The first was held in Northeast India (2-3 August 2012), and the second in Nepal (27-28 September 2013). Participants were academics, activists and members of civil society, politicians, writers, and parliamentarians. The project also sponsored a plenary session on Gender, Conflict and Displacement: The Case of Northeast India at the 14th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM14) in Kolkata (6-9 January 2013). The project has held four partners meetings to ensure close collaboration on activities, two meetings in connection with workshops and a third in Oslo (26 May 2013). A seminar was held at PRIO (27 May 2013) with Rita Manchanda, South Asian Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR), entitled Conflict Resolution in Kashmir and Northeast India: Do Women Have a Voice. Papers have also been presented at conferences in Geneva (at the Graduate Institute) and in Nagaland (St. Josephs College) and project researchers have carried out fieldwork in Nepal and four states in Northeast India: Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland and Assam. To present project results and engage with academics, the project organised an international conference on Gender, Empowerment and Conflict in South Asia in Kolkata (6-8 November 2014) hosted by MCRG. To engage a broader audience of policymakers, a Policy Dialogue on Women and Peacebuilding was held in Delhi (27 February 2015) hosted by WISCOMP. A PRIO policy brief, Women's empowerment in India: From participation to political agency, was presented at the roundtable event, and a report, Women and Peacebuilding: Engendering Policy, has subsequently been published by WISCOMP. In 2016, a final project conference was held in Guwahati, Assam (India), entitled: Womens Empowerment, Multitude and Democracy (19-20 February 2016). The conference focused on womens democratic representation, and the difficult question of whether reservations for women in elected bodies really empower women. Looking forward, efforts to further the empowerment of women in conflict resolution and peacebuilding need to focus on agency. The challenge is to create more awareness of the important contributions of women in this field, at present and in the past. We must not only address the marginalization of women, but also give credit and recognition to the important work women are already carrying out in peacebuilding and conflict resolution.

With a focus on Northeast Indian experiences and a comparative look at Nepal, this project addresses the role of women in local governance and politics, particularly within the context of peace and security processes. The goal of this project is to invest igate the empowerment of women in peace and security processes in different contexts, i.e. in protracted conflict without third party mediation in Northeast India, and post-conflict settings with heavy multilateral and international involvement in Nepal. Recognising the active but understudied and often unacknowledged role of women in conflict as well as peacebuilding, we approach this question by studying how gendered political power is transformed in conflict and post-conflict situations, assuming that differences in the forms and expressions of political power and gendered power relations during and after conflict have an impact on what empowerment might mean and how it might be achieved. By contextualising and tracing manifestations of gendered power in conflict as well as post-conflict settings, our project will contribute new knowledge on processes of disempowerment and empowerment in conflict and peacebuilding. This project is a collaborative effort by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and p artners in India and Nepal: Malaviya Centre for Peace Research (MCPR) at Banaras Hindu University, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (CRG), WISCOMP in New Delhi, North Eastern Social Research Centre (NESRC) in Assam, Nambol L. Sanoi College in Manipur an d National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) North-South in Nepal. The project will contribute to scholarly debates on the implementation of UNSC 1325 as well as the literature on gender, conflict and women's empowerment in South Asia. The project s eeks to combine the study of womens empowerment in peace and security processes with new theorization of armed conflict through grounded empirical research.