Warburg Lecture
Simmons College
February 14, 2024

Thank you, President Cheever.

And thank you Professor Dunbar, [Warburg Professor in International Relations].

I have three immediate reactions to your introduction. The first is to feel exhausted. The second to sulk a bit since you didn't mention my Academy Award. And then, as I think about how to respond in some more appropriately self-deprecating way, I recall the words of Golda Meier: "Don't be humble. You're not that great."

Knowing how to accept an accolade and still feel feminine is difficult for most women. People socialized for supportive roles are not perceived-by themselves or others-as leaders. So now we've launched into the topic of this lecture, without your even noticing it.

What you just experienced, as I was going on about how to claim my authority and take charge of the rest of this hour, reflects a difference between men and women that is pervasive across societies. Men are assumed to be major players; women are not. And that gender distinction, in addition to being fodder for the queries of psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, ought to be a major concern for international security specialists.

I hope in these few minutes I can pull open a new mental door, so you can glimpse through the crack a world closed off, except to those who endure life there. On the other side is: war, with all the terror, chaos, destruction, hardship, and loss few of us have experienced. After all, our information about violent conflict comes mostly from history, foreign policy books, and the mass media. And what do we discover there about the roles of men and women? Men are making war and negotiating peace. Women, on the other hand, are victims. These generalizations are relentlessly inculcated in the public consciousness. Think of the media coverage since September 11th. In the seven weeks that followed, where were the women? They were behind a burqa - not only in Afghanistan but in the Sunday talk show line up, where the guest experts were a paltry 6.8% women.

This afternoon I'll give voice to some important players who have not been heard, who have been shut out because of widespread prejudice about what sort of work and workers are important. There are two problems with stereotypes of men as warriors and women as peacemakers. First, stereotypes fail to describe the fullness of real experience. Everyone in this room can think of men who lay their lives on the line, trying to avert conflict that other men - and some women - are fomenting. The second problem with stereotypes is that they shape expectations. We policy makers buy into the notion that men are the only significant actors in situations of war and peace, and so we fill the negotiating room with gray suits, or black turbans, or their equivalents.

Why should this issue of peacemaking assume special importance now? Is there more war in the world than in prior times? Probably not. But the wars we experience are more dangerous, with weapons whose power to destroy spirals beyond our imaginations. And in a global economy with instant mass communication, conflicts are more economically destabilizing and psychologically troubling to masses that may never hear a shell explode.

At the heart of this bad news is a sense that we are helpless against the challenges of terrorists meeting in small, impenetrable cells; of biological weapons only scientific experts understand; of cultural chasms that seem impossible for even seasoned diplomats to span; of millions of weapons thrust into the hands of children. But there is a piece of good news here as well, for we have tremendous untapped resources at our disposal as we consider the security challenges of the future. Those resources are neither the $238 billion missile defense program currently being proposed; nor the tightest anti-terrorist homeland defense possible for a country built on principles of civil liberties.

Our untapped resources are even more immense - the leaders within more than half the world's population, who have been excluded in the strategies of international security. To engage those resources requires a fundamental shift in our thinking. We must create a new paradigm in our foreign policy - a model of inclusive security. In short, it must become unthinkable not to have women integrally involved in every stage of the peace process: whether conflict prevention, resolving the conflict, or post-conflict stabilization.

"Inclusive security" rests on the principle that women have something different to bring to the table. For our purposes today, we don't need to argue about how nature and nurture conspire to create these differences. There is much, much more that we don't know than otherwise. The research shelves have lots of bare space. But let me propose for those shelves some basic tenets out of my personal observations, which I hope many of you in this room will take up as research questions, about what women bring to the peace process.

Our discussion today is taking place in the psychological shadow of yesterday's headlines: the opening of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, accused of 66 counts of genocide and other war crimes. Milosevic is expected to demand that Bill Clinton and Richard Holbrooke come to testify that he was a negotiating partner, not a war criminal. Indeed, while I was in serving as a diplomat in Vienna, Milosevic was courted as a peacemaker. How do we explain this role reversal? Simply put, there just aren't enough actors to go around. When we are trying to intervene in a war situation, we see very few options, so we often rely on people who have much to lose from a successful peace agreement. We turn to men who plan wars and ask them to plan peace. Poor casting.

It's time to add to the talent pool. The argument as to why women must be included can take off from several philosophical points. Representation is the most obvious: women are half the population, so they should be half the decision makers. Or compensation: since women are victimized, they deserve to be heard. Or rights: leaving women out of peacemaking means their concerns get bargained away at the first step of the negotiation process.

But there is an efficiency argument as well, which I am putting forth today. For lasting stability, we need to have peace promoters, not just warriors, at the negotiating table. More often than not, those peace promoters are women. Certainly, some extraordinary men have changed the course of history with their peacemaking; likewise, a few belligerent women have made it to the top of the political ladder or, at the grassroots, have joined the ranks of terrorists. Exceptions aside, however, women are often the most powerful voices for moderation in times of conflict.

Let me put a human face on six reasons women are valuable to peace making.

The first argument usually cited by lay people is that women are generally adept at building relationships that bridge ethnic, religious, and cultural divides due to their social and biological roles as nurturers. While most men come to the negotiating table directly from the war room and battlefield, women usually arrive straight out of civil activism and-take a deep breath-family care.

This notion that women are somehow different because they are mothers (or are scripted to have been mothers) has been ferociously challenged by some feminist theorists, who see that link between biology and destiny as confining, dangerous, and wrong-headed. But hormones aside, the women I have spoken to in conflict areas all over the world repeatedly say that they are motivated by the need to ensure security for their families. And they describe themselves as different from men in regard to war and peace, saying, "After all, we bring life into the world; so we don't want to see it destroyed." That theme is picked up by many men, like the prime minister of Bosnia, who said to me in 1996, "If we'd had women around the table, there would have been no war; women think long and hard before they send their children out to kill other people's children."

Is he right? I don't know. I'm only reporting to you the common wisdom from the field. But there may be some other aspects of the way women operate that are linked to their family roles. Former President of the Irish Republic Mary Robinson says that women are "instinctively less hierarchical . . . and harness in a cooperative way the energies of those who are like minded." Others challenge this viewpoint and claim female leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Benazir Bhutto act in a manner quite similar to men: hierarchical and power-centered.

So I don't want to put too much stock on a theory that has caused such consternation among those who genuinely care about the advancement of women. Frankly, we don't need that argument to make the case. We can move on to the second point, which is that we have, oddly enough, developed a way of reaching peace agreements that excludes from the table those who have their finger on the pulse of the community where the agreement has to be lived. We wouldn't consider that process in our domestic policy formulation. It's just not smart.

In 1994, I hosted negotiations during the Bosnian war and was amazed to find that among about 60 people on the negotiating teams, there were only men. After all, on a per capita basis, Yugoslavia had more women PhDs than any other country in Europe, and women had worked throughout the conflict to try to avert and then stop the violence. The result of our mindset as conveners was a highly problematic Dayton Agreement designed by warriors like Milosevic, who had been dragged to the table, with no credentials in building peace. The agreement insisted that refugees would return to their homes, but failed to mandate picking up an indicted war criminal who might be the chief of police. As a result, six years later, millions of people in the Balkans are still displaced.

The third reason women are particularly competent in peace processes is that they usually weren't the ones behind the guns. A Palestinian woman suicide bomber made headlines a few days ago precisely because she is an exception. Since people assume the men were firing the shells, the women are less branded after the conflict is quelled. This was pointed out to me by Jelka Kebo, who runs a youth center in Mostar, central Bosnia, who said she could walk across the divided city for months before a man dared to. And since women generally aren't behind the guns, they did not have to go through the psychological process of converting a person into prey. They seem to have less psychological distance to go in the reconciliation effort. I say this having interviewed women from South Africa, Rwanda, Eritrea, Israel, and Bosnia who have led platoons in battle. The situation is nuanced; women certainly can be ferocious warriors. But in conflict situations, some commanders object to the presence of women, saying they undermine the commander's ability to drive their men into acts that would be as ruthless as the situation demands.

This issue of women being able to go across the bridge has an interesting correlation in my fourth point, which is that women, as second-class citizens, are not considered powerful enough to be dangerous. Sumaya Farhat-Naser, a Palestinian living in the West Bank, and Director of the Jerusalem Center for Women, says that in addition to e-mailing each other across the occupation lines, Palestinian women have had a far easier time in getting through checkpoints to connect with their Israeli colleagues. She describes the assertive use of her feminine identity to deflect violence. Looking out from her office window she saw eight Israeli solders firing off their automatic weapons while a group of four young girls stood clutching each other in terror. She ran down the stairs and over to the soldiers, putting her hand in their faces, yelling, "Stop. Let the children go by." Then she ushered the girls across, went back to the soldiers, and said, "You can start shooting again." Sumaya was turning a perceived weakness into strength. She's convinced a man would have been killed in her place. Instead, the soldiers sheepishly withdrew.

Dr. Farhat-Naser argues that it is precisely because of these perceptions that Middle Eastern women are able to reach out to other communities in ways denied to men. But because they are outside the power structure, the impact of their work will be limited. Such a contradiction, however, does not detract from the courage of those who act often at great peril to themselves and their families. When a human rights worker in Pristina, Kosovo, arrived at work to find a land mine under her desk, she could be assure that however second class she might be, at least her work wasn't being dismissed.

Which leads to the fifth reason we need to integrate women in the peace processes: precisely because they haven't been allowed a place within power structures, they are adept at working outside the box. With the operating principle of use what you have, the women of Burundi were admonished by Nelson Mandela, mediating the civil conflict there, to withhold "conjugal rights" if their rebel husbands pick up arms again. Lysistrata revisited.

Kept out of the formal power structure, women like these Burundians are overwhelmingly represented in grassroots organizing. But their work at the community level is under-funded, overlooked, and often dismissed. The good news is that grassroots leaders may mobilize and set their own agenda outside the close scrutiny of political parties or official establishments. These women emerge "without formal authority," to borrow the phrase of leadership expert Ron Haefitz. They may bring Hutu and Tutsi villagers together with traditional dance, or host a radio program that counters divisions along tribal lines.

Innovation is the key, and women seem to have it in their pockets. Take Aloisea Inyumba of Rwanda, the former head of Commission for Unity and Reconciliation. Born and raised in a refugee camp in Uganda, she confronted a society in crisis when she entered her parents' homeland with the Rwandan Patriotic Front in the early '90s. Aloisea witnessed the genocide in 1994 and at age 26 was made the Minister for Families and Gender. Her first job: figure out how to bury almost one million bodies from the massacres that wiped out 10% of the population in 100 days.

Her second responsibility: devise a system to care for 500,000 orphans. "Each One Take One" was her motto as she urged every mother to add at least one more child to her family. Hutu women adopted Tutsi children, and Tutsi women took home Hutus. Here are her words: "I said to myself, 'Oh my God, am I doing the right thing?' When people talk about success, they usually look at politics. But I look at the children who were adopted as a way to measure success."

Understandably, the stories of mothers caught up in the massacre madness were among the most difficult for Aloisea to bear -- a woman who poisoned her five children, because their father was Tutsi says she feared they would face a worse fate, being hacked to death. She heard these confessions as she prepared Rwandan communities for the release of about 100,000 genocidaires from prison. One by one, she visited villages to help them prepare for the release of prisoners-mostly men-who allegedly participated in the killings but have been jailed for years without trial because there aren't enough courts to try them. Their cases will be dealt with now through a community justice system called gacaca. Those accused of killing fewer than ten will be released. But they must go somewhere, and that somewhere is back into the very communities they savaged. As Executive Secretary of Rwanda's National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, Ms. Inyumba is leading one of the most daunting tasks ever undertaken: forging a peaceful society out of both the survivors of the genocide and those who perpetrated it. Her tools? Theater and discussion. Day after day, she helped villagers dramatize what happened, and what reconciliation would mean.

Thus far I've talked about women as nurturers, community experts, non-fighters, second-class citizens and thus less threatening, and innovative thinkers. The sixth and final reason I'll name for having women involved throughout peace processes is that they have displayed a remarkable ability to cross conflict lines.

In 1977, women organizers in Northern Ireland won the Nobel Peace Prize for their non-sectarian public demonstrations. Almost two decades later, in Spring 1996, activists Monica McWilliams (now a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly) and May Blood (now a member of the House of Lords) were told that only leaders of the top ten political parties-all men-would be included in the peace talks. "Well, can we start a political party?" they asked. With only six weeks to organize, they gathered 10,000 signatures to create the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition and get themselves on the ballot. Their showing in the elections was strong enough to earn a place at the peace table. The Coalition describes itself as a non-sectarian, broad-based coalition of women of all political hues and religions, with a mission "to put forward an agenda of reconciliation through dialogue, accommodation and inclusion." As the only non-sectarian party, they drafted key clauses of the Good Friday Agreement regarding the importance of integrated housing and the difficulties of young people. They also lobbied for the early release and reintegration of political prisoners in order to combat social exclusion, and they pushed for a comprehensive review of the police service. The women's prior work with individuals and families affected by "the Troubles" enabled them to formulate such salient contributions to the agreement. In the subsequent public referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, Mo Mowlam, then British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, attributed the overwhelming success of the YES Campaign to the persistent canvassing and lobbying of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition.

Because the Coalition is comprised of women on different sides of the conflict, it has credibility in work that crosses the line. These women have helped calm the often deadly "marching season" by facilitating mediations between Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists. They bring together key members of each community, many of whom are released prisoners, to calm the tensions. This circle of mediators works with local police, meeting quietly and maintaining contacts on a 24-hour basis, providing an effective extension of the limited security forces.

One of the founders, May Blood, has a brief Web site interview, in which she describes goals of the Coalition. The list is remarkably distinct from the work of other parties. Here are a few of them:

• to be a catalyst for change
• to ensure external consultation with groups representing the women, trade unions, business interests, churches, and others, so that the views of these groups are fed into any talks process
• to "interpret" for others so that differences in position can be addressed without conflict being exacerbated by confusion or the use of inflammatory language.
• to build cross-party agreement, acting as an honest broker to bridge political divides
• to address outmoded antagonistic, sectarian, sexist behavior frequently used as a tool by some parties to avoid substantive discussion and political progress

The last is one of my favorites. May, who is white haired and as tall as my shoulder, told me that the first day she entered the parliament, some of the men started moo-ing, implying that the women were cows. She responded by setting up a board outside the parliament doors. At the top she wrote "Name 'em and shame 'em." Every day was recorded, for all to see, the insults to women - with attribution. The insults stopped.

The step the Northern Irish women took from collaborative community work to the policy arena is a giant leap. But in recent years, the construction of a bridge across that gap has begun. The foundation of the bridge is the assertion that it's smart to embrace new approaches to longstanding problems. And it makes practical sense to draw on 100% of the population when looking for solutions and not to ignore women, who are often keenly adept at resolving conflicts.

Three pillars to that bridge are major policy statements from the European Union, the Group of Eight Largest Industrialized Nations, and the United Nations Security Council. The very good news is that these three groups were progressive enough to adopt language calling on the inclusion of women throughout the peace process. The bad news is that the G-8 group that signed off was exclusively male, just as among permanent ambassadors to the UN, about 6 out of 189 are women. Which is to say, we've got a long way to go.

Women are still relegated to the margins of police, military and diplomatic efforts. The policy proclamations are good. Implementation would be better. Let's look, for example, at the effort recently required to bring women into the Afghan peace process. Even beyond the six points I laid out earlier, there were compelling reasons to bring women in as major actors in the peace process. The concurrence of the Taliban's harboring of terrorists intent on destroying modernity, and their medieval repression of women is no coincidence. Terrorism in the name of Islam is being cultivated in cultures in which women are shoved into invisibility. In the governing structure now emerging from the rubble, women's participation is crucial to stability. Their moderation counters the turbulence that breeds terror.

But UN resolutions are often ignored, even within the UN itself. You would think that there would have been dozens of women brought into the November talks in Bonn, to balance the warlords. Instead, it required intense lobbying from the State Department, White House, and US Congress, as well as groups all over the world to get three women into the group of over 60 men that selected the interim ministers. Is it any surprise that the new ministers included only two women out of 29, one of them Minister for Women's Affairs? Hardly a rousing success in a country where, in the past, 40% of the government officials were women.

I assume your brains have been adequately engaged over this past half hour. But ideas come and go. I'd like to close now with a scene that may touch you in a more powerful way, from a couple of weeks ago, in Belgrade. I was with Kada Hotic, a relatively simple woman from Eastern Bosnia, who endured years under shelling in the town of Srebrenica, surrounded by Serb forces. We were together for the launch of a book I've written called This Was Not Our War. Kada stood up in front of a Belgrade audience and told her experience - of the constant shelling, the lack of water, how over and over she'd traversed minefields, sometimes spending the entire night in deep snow, gathering corn and potatoes to keep her family from starving. They survived for several years that way, only to be overrun and divided, men from women. Then in three days, massive numbers of women were raped; and some 8,000 unarmed men and boys were killed, including her son and husband.

She's a refugee now, has lost all her possessions, and she's lonely. But she pulls out of her purse a snapshot, sent from a relative outside the carnage, to show me. It's her husband and her, at a table laughing. Then Kada starts telling me about her son.

"He was born in 1966. He grew tall. His hair was thin, like mine, but he had a beautifully shaped head, with full lips, a long face, and a nose like an eagle. We weren't like a mother and a son. We were friends�pals. He used to confide in me, telling me a girl had left him, and he was hurt. Once he was just sitting there, and I asked, 'What's the matter, Son?' 'She got married,' he said. He didn't get married, just because of that girl. And then there was the war, and he said, 'It would be stupid to get married during the war,' which was true.

I wake up often in the night, and then I remember everything. I think of my son most often and don't get back to sleep for hours. When sleep finally closes my eyes, it's only for a short time. In the morning, I wake up again. I sit in my small room. I have my coffee and drink it alone. I have a cigarette.... Then I remember that my son used to smoke. He made smoke rings. I remember that...and then cry. I wipe my tears in my loneliness."

Kada has built an organization to insist on finding out the truth behind the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II. Her group holds demonstrations that tie up traffic in Sarajevo, which drives the city officials wild. She has learned that political action is not only about making change; it is also about preserving her last shred of self-respect. Comfort from others comes with an unacceptable price. As she explains, "No one can feel the pain of my wound. They can only show compassion. Then I feel like I've become a beggar." Given those choices, she reckons, "I feel better when I protest."

Just when I think I understand Kada's unquenchable drive to never stop demanding justice, she surprises me, as she talks about the Serb soldiers who destroyed her life. "The commanders were awarding medals to whoever committed the worst crime, to the one who killed the most people in the fiercest way, or raped the most women. That soldier who killed my son believed he was doing good for his people and for his religion. I'm sure they're not aware even now that they were committing crimes, and that they did evil to other people."

That same willingness to forgive, Kada extended last month to her Serb audience. She said, "I am not here to say you're guilty. And I wouldn't want what happened to me to happen to any one of you. It's time to move on." The audience responded with heads bent, faces grimaced and tear-streaked as they acknowledged their failure to stop the onslaught that emanated from their political leaders.

The next morning, calls started coming in from other Serbian cities, asking if she would come there. For Kada, the experience was a breakthrough. As we sat in the hotel lobby saying goodbye, she said, "I don't speak diplomatic language like you. I'll just tell you straight. Now I know I'm not alone. I can work with these Serb people. Together, we can create a new future."

That moment I witnessed a transforming power that no intelligence gathering can deduce, no economic sanctions can induce, no weaponry can force, no diplomatic skill can maneuver. That power is available to the foreign policy community, if we can break out of our old security paradigms to become inclusive in the way we understand the world and what will change it.

And in the course of that new understanding, we, as individuals, cannot help but be changed. For inclusive security is not only about how we see men and women, how we look for all the stakeholders in a problem situation; or how we think outside the box for solutions. It's also about how when we open ourselves to include not just those around us, but all the parts of who we are, we find a new capacity for empathy that is our best hope for the future.

I would like to leave you with one final thought. When I had lunch with Joan Warburg this afternoon I said to her "Joan, what do you want me to do today?" And she said, "Swanee, I want you to inspire the young women of Simmons College." So I want to tell you students at Simmons that Joan Warburg is an example of a life lived with intention and you are her legacy. Your charge is to live your lives making a difference for others as she has made a difference for you in ways you will personally never know. Thank you.

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