Rita Manchanda
India

Rita Manchanda is Senior Program Executive for the South Asian Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR). A journalist, writer, researcher, and human rights activist, she has dedicated much of her work to bridging the deep political and ethnic divides between India and Pakistan. She advocates for the integration of women peace builders into the policy arena, firmly believing in the vision of alternate, people-focused security and the power of participatory democracy. Ms. Manchanda is also the founder and a national committee member of the Pakistan India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy and an active member of the nuclear disarmament movement in India. Her many publications include the edited volume Women, War, and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency and Women Making Peace. She is the director of SAFHR's program on media and conflict and is working on a book on the subject. She holds a master of arts in philosophy and international relations from the University of Geneva.

Ms. Manchanda's peace-building activities include:

• organizing the 2001 "Strengthening Women Building Peace" conference to discuss the role of gender in conflict transformation in Kathmandu, Nepal, and the 2002 follow-up conference "Jammu and Kashmir: Women Building Peace," in Jammu, India;
• directing several projects on media and conflict for SAFHR and exploring a peaceful, non-incendiary method of reporting conflicts;
• investigating and reporting on the India/Pakistan relationship, focusing on the Kashmir insurgency as Bureau Chief for the Plus Channel in New Delhi, India, and a freelance journalist for Radio Deutsche in Cologne, Germany, and reporting on the conflict in Nepal for Frontline magazine (India);
• conducting research on human rights and peace as part of the SAFHR team for its annual Human Rights and Peace Studies program; and
• developing a methodology of gendered mapping of conflicts, urging women to map or spatially represent their lived experience of militarized civilian space, challenging the dominant, state-focused perspective, which tends to construct knowledge from political, economic, and cultural locations of power and privilege.

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