A Spartan woman says goodbye to her son as he goes to war in an 1881 drawing by Dionisio Baixeras. UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES

By Janine di Giovanni, a columnist at Foreign Policy and a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.

In Aristophanes’s fifth-century B.C. comedy Lysistrata, the women of ancient Athens and Sparta discover an ingenious way of ending the war between the two city-states. They withhold sex from their menfolk until the warriors cease fighting and sit down to settle terms. It’s possibly the most original and effective peace process ever devised.

While Aristophanes’s method might not work for ending modern wars, such as those still raging in Syria and Ethiopia’s Tigray region, the general concept still holds: Women often have unique skills and power when they negotiate or sit down at the table to end conflicts. Yet why are so few women involved in peace processes as negotiators, mediators, community organizers, or facilitators of so-called Track 2 dialogues—far fewer than in many other areas of politics and policy? Why are questions of war and peace still left almost entirely to men?

Women, peace, and security is such a popular topic for university programs, think tanks, and Zoom conferences that it even has its own acronym: WPS. This month, the United Nations is set to host its annual open debate on WPS. The field of WPS gets lots of attention, makes everyone feel as if they’re doing something, and ticks all the right boxes for donors.

But WPS is a talking-shop term. Even though I am a woman involved in peace and security—I have worked with the United Nations, teach about conflict at Yale University, and have written about peace and security in my books and countless articles—I’ve been baffled by the term for years. What exactly does it mean? Engaging civil society to take a more active role in ending conflicts? Putting women at the forefront of negotiating teams? Training more women in peacebuilding?

All of it sounds fine on paper—but in reality, it rarely happens. The U.N. Security Council’s groundbreaking Resolution 1325 recognized the disproportionate, unique, and harrowing impact of conflict on women and girls. It was meant to increase the participation of women and “incorporate gender perspectives.” Governments were supposed to implement national action plans to support women peacebuilders.

But in the current conflicts raging across the globe, I don’t see many women leading the talks or being empowered to select the participants of peace conferences. With the U.N. deadlocked in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere by various member states that benefit from each continuing war, the trend falls on letting boutique conflict resolution organizations—such as the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, the Berghof Foundation in Berlin, or the European Institute of Peace in Brussels—set the stage by engaging in Track 2 dialogue, as informal, behind-the-scenes peace processes are known.

Track 2 usually involves civil society representatives hashing out the opening moves of how to end a conflict. This often includes faith-based leaders and—at least aspirationally—women’s groups. Although women’s groups are a powerful component of civil society, women are rarely there. Interestingly enough, all three conflict resolution organizations mentioned above are run by men who once held senior positions at the U.N.

The women close to the men waging war could also have tremendous influence. The powerful spouses of leaders, for example, are not always peacemakers, but they should be—and things might turn out differently if they were called on to influence peace processes. Wives of senior military commanders are potent as well; they can often influence their husbands in a way that the men’s closest advisors cannot. They are often mothers and can exercise empathy. They can help stop massacres or grievous human rights abuses.

Just think of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s wife, Asma, who was silent when her husband chemically gassed Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, in 2013, killing children. This was not long after she gave an infamous interview to Vogue (now scrubbed from the internet) talking about her children’s charity. Asma was silent when her husband bombed family homes in Homs and when he leveled Aleppo with barrel bombs, hitting schools and hospitals.

Asma was also silent when he starved to death the people of Moadamiya using his tactic of “starvation or surrender.” She could have reminded her husband that he also had children—what if this were happening to them? Like the strong women of Lysistrata, she could have leveraged their relationship, but she chose not to. The same with Mirjana Markovic, the wife of Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, who was considered the power behind the throne as her husband ripped the country apart via four wars in the 1990s. Markovic was presumably with her husband in Belgrade in July 1995, when 8,000 Bosniak boys and men were slaughtered at Srebrenica. Milosevic was the top of the chain of command, and he was besotted with his wife—she could have influenced him and stopped the genocide. She was a fiercely nationalist politician in her own right and may even have pressed him on, underlining the point that leaders’ spouses are often too important to ignore.

WUNRN

Foreign Policy