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The Pacific, its island nations and its peoples live in a diverse and complex environment of unique strengths, challenges and cultures around remote geography, climate change and disasters, gender relations, security, governance and regional cooperation. On 31 October 2021, we marked the 21st anniversary of the UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS). The WPS agenda acknowledges that women and girls are disproportionately and uniquely impacted by armed conflict and disasters and recognises the critical role that women can and already do play in humanitarian action and peace building efforts.

This webinar will consider what the WPS agenda has meant for women across the Pacific. Specifically, what are the understandings and meanings of women, peace and security in a local, national and regional Pacific context, and what are the histories, knowledge and dynamics shaping these experiences?

UNSCR 1325 affirms that peace and security efforts are more sustainable when women are equal partners in the prevention of conflict, the delivery of relief and recovery efforts and in the decision making around all aspects of lasting peace. How has the implementation of the WPS agenda across the Pacific been impacted by (and impacted) the Boe Declaration; Regional and National Action Plans; recent global talks at COP 26 - UN Climate Change Conference of Parties in Glasgow (31 Oct-13 Nov), and almost 2 years of the COVID-19 global pandemic? 

Given these contexts, this webinar will examine what this has meant in practice and what have been the opportunities, challenges and implications for the lives of women and girls and communities across the Pacific; and provide recommendations as to what sorts of changes, approaches, policies and actions need to be addressed by governments, multilateral organisations, and civil society to meaningfully progress peace and security and the full participation of women and girls across the Pacific.

Speakers

• Ms Sharon Bhagwan Rolls, Regional Manager: Shifting the Power Coalition, Suva, Fiji Islands
• Dr Nicole George, Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) webinars are focused at examining the implementation of the WPS agenda at the local, national and global contexts. It has been more than 20 years since the adoption of UN Security Resolution 1325 (in 2000) yet the progress towards the goal of peace, human rights and security, gender equality and gender justice has at best been slow. This series provides a forum to hear diverse voices and perspectives - academic, civil society, government, peace builders and women human rights defenders - and to critically examine these complex challenges, with a goal of promoting the meaningful participation of women, in all their diversity, in all aspects of peace and security.