Executive Summary: 2nd SEACSN-Philippines National Workshop The Role of Women in Philippine Peace Efforts
Executive Summary: 2nd SEACSN-Philippines National Workshop The Role of Women in Philippine Peace Efforts
27-28 September 2002
The 2nd National Workshop on the Role of Women in Philippine Peace Efforts was jointly organised by the Southeast Asian Conflict Studies Network (SEACSN) – Philippines and the La Salle Institute of Governance. The event was funded by the Swedish Department for Research Co-operation (SAREC), the research arm of the Swedish International Development and Co-operation Agency (Sida). About thirty participants attended.
The workshop objectives were to identify:
- To identify factors that facilitate and constrain the role of women as a peacemakers,
- To identify what would assist women in developing more effective actions for peace,
- To outline Filipino women’s agenda for peace in terms of an overall perspective on issues of peace, violence, and conflict.
These objectives were implemented through the panel sessions on women in their peace efforts at both community and national levels, and, on gender and peacemaking.
Panel Session 1 provided narratives of women at the community level. Papers presented focused on the experiences of women who had survived violence in Pampanga, the Sama Dilaut women in Tambacan, Iligan City, the Tinguian women in Abra, and the women in large, urban, poor community organisations in Metro Manila. Panel Session 2 also provided narratives of women, but focused on the national level. Papers presented discussed women politicians in Zamboanga City; the contributions of women in the Bicol region in mainstreaming gender in peace building in the country; women peace practitioners in Marawi City and Lanao del Norte and how they handle stress; and finally, the role of women in unifying the tri-peoples.
Panel Session 3 examined gender theories. The papers concentrated on the conflicting preconceptions of the role of women, the applicability of narrative analysis and semantic webbing in understanding real-time life stories of seven women; the influences that contribute to the formation of the personhood or divinity of every adult; the suffering of women during the Philippine-American War; the issues raised at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and the contrasting images of women during the revolutionary period.
Two subsidiary workshops were held to flesh out the discussions from the panel sessions. The first workshop examined the factors that facilitate and/or constrain the role of Filipino women as peacemakers. Participants were divided into two workshop groups representing community and national levels. The community level group identified the security of land tenure and the issue of ancestral domain as factors that facilitated the role of Filipino women as peacemakers. The constraining factors were the lack of government intervention to preserve indigenous cultures, the lack of recognition of basic rights, the lack of support systems within society, the non-recognition of involuntary settlers and indigenous peoples, the establishment of peace zones, and the development of government projects that cause problems to the indigenous peoples. The group recommended that there be social structures to support women’s groups, that education should also be for men, that advocacy be continued, that women should enter the political arena, that knowledge should be shared, and that the media should be used to expose uplifting stories on women.
The national level group identified schools, the election of two women presidents, national-based women’s organisations, globalised threats, the media, the church, Edsa 1 and 2, civil society, and the enactment of women and reproductive health-oriented national policy as both facilitating and constraining factors. The group also recommended further co-ordination amongst women’s organisations working in the area of peace, the drafting of women’s agenda for peace, the broadening of women’s participation in drafting the above agenda, and the assumption of key leadership positions in peace organisations and processes.
The second workshop discussion focused on the Filipino woman’s agenda for peace and the implications to policy. The participants agreed to end women’s invisibility by monitoring and guarding the implementation of policies, changing attitudes, focusing on capacity and capacity-building, and building support systems.
The conference ended with suggestions of follow-up workshops in the future.