By Lama | Project Leader
Peace is built when everyone works together – when everyone is given the opportunity to contribute, engage, and lead with their own skills, in their own communities, by their own passions. When we draw lines of division between us, quieting those who have the potential to lend a hand to the peace-building process, we hinder the progress and limit the ways in which conflict can be overcome and transformed in scales large and small around the world.
Women are too often quieted – forced into the outer edges of the peace-building conversation. This March, just before Lama embarked on her climb of Mount Lobuche in Nepal, Friends of Europe shared statistics regarding Women, Peace, and Security, which revealed the still minimal role women play in peacebuilding on a global scale. As of June 2016, only 22% of national parliamentarians are women; from 2008 to 2012, women were signatories in only 2 of the 61 peace agreements; and between 1990 and 2010, only 92 of almost 600 peace agreements even referenced women.
Women play a vital role, however, in efforts to build lasting peace on global and local levels, alike. In fact, when women are included in peace-building processes, there is a 20% increase in the probability of an agreement lasting at least 2 years, and a 35% increase in the probability of an agreement lasting at least 15 years. So why aren’t they consistently more central to the conversation?
Lama, through embarking on her second mountain-climbing expedition – this time of Europe’s highest and the world’s tenth-highest peak, Mount Elbrus is Russia – is seeking to continue to show the world what women are capable of. In summiting one of the world’s tallest mountains, she draws attention to the fact that women are not only capable but also willing to face any challenge, no matter the nature. As an integral leader of an international peace-building organisation based in Jordan, her roles both in the office and in her adventures outside of it all centre on promoting women in peacebuilding, and in doing so, creating environments in which lasting peace is possible.
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