International Alert
Women, Violent Conflict and Peacebuilding
(London: International Alert, 1999, 72pp.)

Lysistrata, immortalized by Aristophanes, mobilized women on both sides of the Athenian-Spartan War for a sexual strike in order to force men to end hostilities and avert mutual annihilation.  In this, Lysistrata and her co-strikers were forerunners of the American humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow who proposed a hierarchy of needs: water, food, shelter and sexual relations being the foundation. (See Abraham Maslow. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 1977)  Maslow is important for conflict resolution work because he stresses dealing directly with identifiable needs in ways that are clearly understood by all parties and with which they are willing to deal at the same time.  read more »

Anna C. Snyder
Setting the Agenda for Global Peace: Conflict and Consensus building
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, 164pp.)

The content of Anna Snyder’s very useful study is somewhat narrower than the title of her book. She studies in detail the peace-agenda setting of NGOs preparing for the 1995 4th UN World Conference on Women (FWCW) held in Beijing, China. The first World Conference was in Mexico City as a highlight of the 1975 UN-sponsored International Year of the Women. As one year was hardly enough to bring about the goals of the year —equality, development and peace — the UN General Assembly transformed the Year into a 1975-1985 Decade on Women. There was a mid-term conference to evaluate progress in 1980 in Copenhagen, followed by an end of Decade conference in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985.  read more »

Cynthia Cockburn
The Space Between Us : Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict
(London: Zed Books, 1998, 247pp.)

"Maybe if women would only gain the determination to represent publicly what they have always stood for privately in evolution and history (realism of  householding, responsibility of upbringing,  resourcefulness in peacekeeping, and devotion to healing), they might well add ethically  restraining, because truly supranational, power to politics in the wider sense."  Erik Erikson  Identity, Youth and Crisis  read more »

Ashima Kaul and Qurrat-ul-Ain
Building Constituencies of Peace
Stakeholders in Dialogue – V
(New Delhi: WISCOMP, 2006, 26pp.)

One of the goals of Women in Security, Conflict Management, and Peace (WISCOMP) is to provide a safe space for creative expressions particularly for women writers across ethnic, political and generational divides.  A particular focus has been the conflict in Kashmir.  One of the biggest casualties of this conflict, in addition to death and destruction, is the breakdown of human relationships.  read more »

Oishik Sircar
Engendering Persecution: Refugee Law, International Protection and Violence against Women in South Asia.
(New Delhi: WISCOMP, 2006, 64pp.)

Oishik Sircar, a human rights lawyer and campaigner, has written a useful discussion paper in a WISCOM series that includes the situation of Afghan and Burmese women refugees in Delhi.  Sircar provides a broad overview of the difficulties of women refugees and asylum seekers, particularly in South Asia.  Although women and children make up the bulk of refugees and internally displaced persons — an estimated 75 per cent — it has taken the international community and individual states a long time to focus on the specific issues of women.   read more »