A Retrospective on Global Humanitarian Week’s Events
By Luke Pineda and Ian Avedician
Emphasizing the importance of humanitarian and advocacy work is vital to understanding how women can be more involved in politics. Post-conflict areas can provide women the space and opportunity to spread into areas of influence that may have been barred to them previously.
Pamela Paxton, Melanie M. Hughes, and Tiffany D. Barnes in their book Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective cite that in recent times, many post-conflict areas have seen a significant boost in women’s representation. For example, Rwanda experienced an increase of 17.1% of women legislators prewar to 56.3% in 2010. The toll that conflict can have on society can be severe, however, it can also serve as a basis for changing societal norms. Women in conflict are often tasked with filling roles in society that traditionally were filled by men which allows for cultural expectations of gender to be altered.
The Center for International Stabilization and Recovery (CISR) is a non-profit organization that works to raise awareness and offer assistance to communities undergoing post-conflict recovery. They do so by hosting events with special guests from the community and producing academic journals regarding topics of post-conflict recovery. Their journal, The Journal of Conventional Weapons Destruction, focuses primarily on demining efforts and other humanitarian crises in post-conflict societies. Every year, CISR hosts the Global Humanitarian Week here at JMU and this year, the programming included two major events and a week-long donation drive for Afghan refugees in the Harrisonburg community.
Global Humanitarian Week provides CISR with the opportunity to inform and take action within the community to promote a better understanding of the topics they have chosen for the week. The chosen events for this year are able to be viewed not only through the context of post-conflict recovery, but also how feminist theory lends a hand in how women play a vital role in the process. These events touched on areas ranging from grassroots advocacy in Congress and effective tactics to the de-bombing of Iraq through the efforts of women and allies in the country. Awareness and advocacy, the two main themes of Global Humanitarian Week 2022, cannot be achieved without the inclusion of women and the efforts exhibited by them.
The week kicked off with a Zoom webinar focused on grassroots advocacy within a legislative context, specifically Congress. Kristen Stevens, HALO Trust’s head of Congressional Affairs, joined CISR staff to provide insight into effective congressional advocacy tactics. She started off the webinar by detailing HALO Trust’s role in de-mining and their history of humanitarian work within a global context. After going into great detail about the organization and all the work they have done, she began to talk about Congressional advocacy on the whole and how to do so effectively.
Taking a broad approach to discussing Congressional advocacy allowed Stevens to highlight some of the standard practices of the profession. Goal setting, influencing the budget, intricacies of the Hill, feedback, and stakeholder networks prove beneficial as effective ways to advocate on the Hill, but the presentation lacked some advice on how to do so from a grassroots position.
Focusing much of the attention on her work, Stevens focused on advocating as a professional, someone who has a foot in the door from a career perspective. The lack of addressing effective tactics for individuals with no experience could have provided an even more beneficial perspective to an already effective presentation. Women’s movements often start from grassroots efforts and sometimes lack the proper networking capabilities of those already in Congressional advocacy professions. Despite this lacking area of the presentation, the remainder of the webinar was filled with very useful information for people seeking to advocate at the Congressional level.
Steven's presentation highlighted the importance of goal setting within advocacy efforts. A good campaign cannot go far without goals. For women’s movements, in particular, this could be in relation to shifting views on policy outcomes related to reproductive rights, equal pay, or other issues that disproportionately affect women. Building maps of support can help overcome this challenge and build strong networks, something vital to feminist theory, to help aid in advocacy efforts. Traditional male-dominated networks fill many of the fields in which women seek to gain equal representation, thus networks between other groups are essential.
By taking Steven’s advice about mapping potential networks, pre-existing groups can fundamentally work together to overcome these otherwise male-dominated, patriarchal spaces. Networks can include local community leaders, other groups, constituents of representatives, or allied Congressional representatives. This webinar, although lacking in direction of specific policy issues, provided a great opportunity to apply your own issue areas to the advice given. The following event took an even more distinct look into women’s role in post-conflict recovery.
The documentary that CISR screened as part of their Global Humanitarian week was Into The Fire by National Geographic. The documentary highlighted the work of the Yazidi women in northern Iraq; who are working to demine the area following the ousting of ISIS. Led by Hana Khider, the film shows how these women have been thrust into positions where they must take initiative to ensure a safer community. These Yazidi women are just one of a multitude of groups that work for the Mines Advisory Group (MAG). MAG is a non-governmental organization that seeks to help with the removal of landmines in post-conflict areas. After the documentary was shown, there were two guest speakers: Jamie Franklin and Alex Pate. Jamie Franklin is an Executive Director for MAG and JMU alum, Alex Pate, is the MAG Grants Manager. Both spoke about how they got involved with MAG and how one can get involved in the field of demining. The film did well in highlighting the concept of how conflict can reshape and change societal norms, with Hana and her team of women having to take on newfound responsibilities in fostering and rebuilding their community.
To further explore the ways in which women have made impacts within the field of post-conflict recovery, we sat down with Brenna Matlock, the Senior Project Manager, and Program Coordinator at CISR. Matlock focuses her research on gender’s role in post-conflict recovery societies which served to help connect the ideas from our course to a more worldly perspective. In an interview with Matlock, she detailed some of the ways in which these two issue areas intersect.
During the interview, Matlock spoke to us about the ways in which post-conflict recovery groups abroad are dominated by ex-military men. These spaces have dampened the visibility of women in the field and have created little room for women’s accomplishments to be documented. Similar to gender quotas in other countries’ political elections, CISR and the US Department of State have made it a requirement that other countries participating in training courses and leadership conferences send women to these events.
“That is also a requirement that the State Department requires,” Matlock said. “You need to have gender parity in your teams and throughout all the levels of your organization, and so, that is one of the forces that will change how they are recruiting people. Specifically, the recruitment of women.”
“Hopefully we will have more women in our training, but it is predominantly men.”
This hope is vital in order to increase the opportunities for women to be involved and increase visibility for those already making waves in the global humanitarian community.
Matlock further discusses the perception of women in de-mining spaces and the tropes that encompass them in her article, Moving the Story Forward Utilizing Deminer Narratives to Increase Women’s Empowerment in Mine Action and Beyond. Women de-miners have often been met with, what Matlock calls, “the novelty trope” that has indirectly placed negative narratives on women in the field.
One of the most captivating quotes from her article reads, “The issues with reusing this narrative is that it perpetuates the belief that women’s contributions are novel (or, at worst, an exception to “normal” operations).”
According to Matlock, women in the field have the ability to showcase the physical change in the communities they help, but post-conflict recovery, on the whole, tends to undervalue women.
“Women de-miners are physical examples of how women are contributing and I think that they could be used as an example of how women are further participating in other factors,” Matlock said. “This is just one small piece of how women are helping, but what are other ways that are not so visible.”
“There is so much more we can talk about rather than what it captured at the moment. But one factor I try to keep in mind is that our de-mining organizations are doing a good job of putting names and faces by recognizing the women within them.”
“We usually hear the voices of white women within these communities, but we need to make it so that we hear all women’s voices.”
These words should resonate with feminist aspirations for all areas, not just post-conflict recovery. Bringing forth many of the ways in which women are contributing to global issues and allowing for more visibility will only be beneficial to all women.
If you want to hear the full interview, click here to listen!
Women within the field of post-conflict recovery have proven to produce governments that reduce the likelihood of reoccurring conflicts, so getting more women into positions of power and visibility will hopefully allow for more peace in the world. As women being to join more post-conflict recovery training and teams, there is hope for less conflict in areas that previously experienced it more frequently. Matlock’s observations on the field are a great start for those looking to learn more about the intersectionality of the issue and the ways in which we can work harder to include more women in conversations about post-conflict recovery and build more equitable post-conflict societies.
If one is looking for more information on the topic of demining or wants to get involved in the field there are several pathways to do so. Firstly, for more information, one can look on the MAG and CISR websites for journals or events revolving around the topic of demining. If you are looking to get more involved in the field of demining there are a multitude of options for you to do so. One option as suggested by Alex Pate is to first get involved in the Harrisonburg community. Building up whatever experience you can work with the refugee population in Harrisonburg has a large refugee population and there are many organizations, like Delta Phi Epsilon, which does extensive work with the refugee population in Harrisonburg. If you are looking to make this your career path, you are in luck as the demining field is full of JMU alumni!