Gender
Join USIP in Celebrating Women’s History Month
This March, USIP’s global team commemorates the remarkable advances women have made, while also recognizing the long road ahead to equality. At USIP we know from first-hand experience that women’s inclusion is an essential element of building durable, lasting peace.
- Read USIP President and CEO Nancy Lindborg’s reflection on the milestones women have achieved in the last five years.
- Learn about one of the women’s groups USIP works with to resolve violent conflict and advance gender equality: Kenya’s Sisters Without Borders is making peace and confronting terrorism despite immense challenges.
- For the 2020 Jennings Randolph Senior Fellowship Competition, USIP seeks applications from senior experts who will advance thought leadership and research supporting the thematic area of Women, Gender, and Nonviolent Movements.
USIP's Work on Gender
Violent conflict and extremism have different impacts on men and women, and understanding those distinctive effects is critical for designing effective peacebuilding approaches and ensuring greater gender equality and protection for women and girls. Over the past two decades, international organizations and the U.S. government have increasingly recognized the importance of gender equality in creating enduring, peaceful societies. The U.S. Institute of Peace advances scholarship, carries out programs on the ground, and informs policy on issues of gender, peace and security. USIP works with academics, the military, peacekeepers, diplomats and practitioners to advance women’s participation in decision-making, promote peaceful concepts of masculinity and prevent sexual violence in conflict.
Learn more in our fact sheet on USIP's Work on Gender.
Featured Publications
What Women Have Won
Five years ago, as the newly appointed and first woman president of the United States Institute of Peace, I was celebrating International Women’s Day in Kabul with the wonderful Afghan women on our USIP country team. Having first visited Afghanistan in 1997, when the country was in the grip of the Taliban, it was a joyous opportunity to mark nearly two decades of progress with this group of professional women—lawyers, scholars, and program managers.
Belquis Ahmadi on Afghan Women and the Peace Process
Since 2001, Afghan women have assumed larger roles in society—becoming teachers, doctors and government officials. With intra-Afghan talks expected to begin this month, USIP’s Belquis Ahmadi says it’s important the Taliban “accept the reality that today’s Afghanistan is very different from the country they ruled” when it comes to women’s rights.
How to Win on Women, Peace and Security
For almost 15 years, Jacqueline O’Neill, now Canada’s first ambassador for women, peace and security, pondered a question that dogs policymakers everywhere and bears heavily on her work: How can gover...
Current Projects
Women Building Peace Award
History has shown that civil resistance is most successful when women are engaged, peace processes are more likely to last when women are involved, and a country’s propensity for conflict is lower with higher levels of gender equality. The Women Building Peace Award represents the Institute’s commitment to highlighting the vital role of individual women who are working every day in fragile or conflict-affected countries or regions in the pursuit of peace. The award will honor a woman peacebuilder whose substantial and practical contribution to peace is an inspiration and guiding light for future women peacebuilders.
Religious Peacebuilding Action Guides
USIP has developed a series of Action Guides focused on religion and conflict analysis, mediation, reconciliation and gender-inclusive religious peacebuilding in collaboration with the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers and the Salam Institute for Peace and Justice. These Action Guides provide a practical overview of the religious peacebuilding field and the role religion plays in driving both conflict and peace, examples of how religious actors and institutions have contributed to the prevention and resolution of conflict, and considerations for how best to engage the religious sector in peacebuilding.
Preventing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
Conflict-related sexual violence is increasingly recognized as not only a weapon of war, but a threat to international peace and security. In 2012, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), the Human Rights Center at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, and Women in International Security (WIIS), launched the Missing Peace Initiative to examine the issue of sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings...