ABOUT WISCOMP

WISCOMP Team
Dr. Meenakshi Gopinath
Sumona DasGupta
Manjrika Sewak
Aandal

For more information contact:
Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP)
Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Core 4A, Upper Ground Floor, India Habitat Centre
Lodi Road, New Delhi – 110003
INDIA
Tel: 91-11-4648450, 4651606
Fax: 91-11-4648451
Email: wiscomp@vsnl.com, furhhdl@vsnl.com
Website: furhhdl.org

PROGRAMMES
WISCOMP’s Engendering Security Programme includes:

à Professional Development and Academic Enrichment

à Networking and Regional Initiatives

It draws upon a large, effective and committed community of animators from academia, the media, government and NGOs whose attempt it will be to ensure that the unique resources, skills, perspectives and understanding that women can bring to peace building are adequately recognized and encouraged.

Scholar of Peace Fellowship
Awarded by WISCOMP for academic research, media projects and special projects, the Scholar of Pecae Fellowships are designed to encourage original and innovative work by academics, policy makers, defence and foreign affairs practitioners, NGO workers and others. The awards cover periods ranging from three months to one year and are open to young scholars, mid-career professionals and experts. The studies undertaken are expected to provide better information about ignored issues and problems that pertain to security, promote better understanding of the structural causes of conflict and suggest alternatives for non-violent intervention and peace initiatives. The fellowships are seen as an important step to encourage more women to work in this crucial area.
The fellowships are ordinarily open to South Asian citizens under the age of 45 years. Candidates should send in their curriculum vitae, a brief note on the proposed project, its scope and potential impact, and the contact details of two referees.
Applications are accepted throughout the year.

Symposium
It offers students, scholars and practitioners an opportunity for substantive discussion and debate on issues that impact peace and security such as: conflict-management, women in situations of armed conflict, refugees, trafficking in women and children, arms proliferation, environmental and food security, development choices and their impact, globalization and women’s livelihoods, citizenship and governance, international arms control regimes, human rights, militarism, peace and others.
The programme also has components for building expertise and skills for professional advancement and developing networking opportunities for young and mid-career women professionals in the field.
Conflict Transformation Workshop

It attempts to develop skills in facilitating the potential for dialogue by training the next generation of South Asians. The workshop focuses primarily on empowering women and other groups such as students, young and mid-career professionals and NGO workers to harness their potential in building democratic public opinion against war and conflict. Employing innovative tools like simulation games, role-play and focus group discussions conflict transformation practitioners help participants move beyond prejudice and suspicion towards understanding and trust.

Roundtable
The discussions revolve around contemporary issues that impact regional security, foreign policy and conflict transformation. Policy makers, activists, scholars, media persons and others in public life come together to create a discerning public opinion on Human Security issues. They also provide a forum for young entrants to these fields to present and publicize their work.

WISCOMP Roundtables provide a strong foundation for the empowerment of new voices. The discussions have focused on themes such as Gender Perspectives to Conflict Coverage: The Role of Women Media Persons, Breaking the Silence: Women and Kashmir and Non-Military Variables of Security: Voices from Pakistan.
Regional Workshop

It is a cross-border effort to bring together non-governmental conflict resolution practitioners, media persons, government officials and business professionals, and to provide them an opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences. It addresses the shared concerns of nations and peoples within the South Asian region in order to foster the collective will to learn from one another to promote peace. It seeks to widen the role of women in multi-track diplomacy processes.

The programme also seeks to extend support to fact finding missions and field trips that study armed conflicts in South Asian region and their impact (especially on women and children), peace processes and peacebuilding efforts.

Mentor Programme
It opens up avenues for bringing together experience and potential in a stimulating exchange. The programme provides a strong platform for young entrants to interact with expert professionals and practitioners from various fields whose areas of work focus on peace, security and international relations. It enables the protégés to widen their network and build a circle of professional contacts. It also encourages people to actively consider vocations in fields such as conflict transformation, peace education and security studies. This one-to-one interaction engenders overall development of the individual in line with career aspirations, personal advancement, needs and concerns.

Internship
It is an excellent way to gain practical know-how of a particular work environment. Though a new introduction to the Indian workforce, internship is fast gaining popularity as a placement where young entrants can build professional networks and develop mentoring relationships to further their career objectives. It gives young people the opportunity to "test drive" a career and allows them to see from the inside if a career is right for them.

The special benefits that accrue from an internship with WISCOMP include access to the organization’s unique network of mid and senior-level professionals from across the international affairs field, opportunities to learn more about international issues, build professional networks and develop mentoring relationships with prominent women scholars, policy analysts and opinion makers.

EVENTS
Roundtables
Gender Perspectives to Conflict Coverage: The Role of Women Mediapersons
August and December 1999
New Delhi
The discussions were led by noted media personalities and academics, including Barkha Dutt, Seema Mustafa, Ritu Menon, Shailja Bajpai and Siddharth Vardarajan, who examined the extent to which the presence of women media persons may have brought a different perspective to the media coverage and the role they could play in reporting future conflicts.

In addition to the experiences of women reporting on the war front (in the backdrop of the Kargil conflict) and their interaction with soldiers, participants also discussed social and internal conflicts and the tendencies to glorify and romanticize conflict. Many felt that women reporters could offer alternative interpretations that may be less militaristic and jingoistic in nature.

Panelists also brought to the fore the "redefinition of news" and attributed the growing attention to "soft issues" such as human rights and development to women reporters who had hitherto covered such issues. The larger issues of journalistic ethics and values in the coverage of day-to day conflicts and large-scale wars were also critiqued.

The animated discussion among eighty participants ended with the Chair concluding that women could play a significant role in offering a different perspective to understanding conflict and promoting peace and reflecting this in their reportage.

Symposium
Human Security in the New Millennium
August 21st – 26th, 2000
New Delhi

The six-day Symposium was planned as an effort to shift the terms of the dominant discourse on peace and security in a direction where the needs and concerns of people rather than those purely of the state are articulated and placed at the centre of the debate. The Symposium sought to initiate the process of equipping young women and men in South Asia with tools of analysis on issues related to peace and security that are sensitive to the question of gender. It also provided a context for them to explore the crucial interface between gender issues and international affairs and network across boundaries on the challenges facing South Asia including trafficking, refugee crises, ethnicity and nationalism, non-violent conflict transformation and negotiation.

More than 90 participants and resource persons from the South Asian region, representing diverse professional backgrounds, attended the Symposium. The Keynote Address on Human Security in the New Millennium: Challenges and Opportunities was delivered by eco-feminist Dr. Vandana Shiva. This was followed by an intensive five-day interaction that included panel discussions, plenary lectures, documentary film screenings and workshops by professionals and scholars from South Asia on themes including gender and nationalism, women in conflict situations, gender and peacebuilding, globalization and development et al.

The Valedictory function included a talk by Asma Jehangir on Engendering Security and a performance titled Her Voice by danseuse Geeta Chandran and puppeteer Anurupa Roy. A photo-exhibition When the Gun is Raised, Dialogue Stops…Women’s Voices from Kashmir was also mounted for the participants of the Symposium. Artists Sonia Jabbar and Sheeba Chhachhi, through interviews and testimonies, expressed eloquently the plight of the ordinary Kashmiri woman, whose concerns are often obscured by the rhetoric and dominant images of violence and aggression in the Valley.

Roundtable
Breaking the Silence: Women and Kashmir
December 9th, 2000
New Delhi
The Roundtable provided a unique context for women from Jammu and Kashmir to articulate and communicate, with a wider audience beyond the valley, their concerns about and perspectives and vision of the conflict and its transformation. It brought the voices of women in the valley to a broader platform to identify the ways in which they could impact the processes of understanding and transformation. It sought to lift the veil of silence of the last eleven years and to create a safe space for dialogue and reconciliation among women and men representing different perspectives on the conflict.

The debate and discussion, spread over 11 hours, comprised two sections. The first section titled Perspectives on Kashmir brought together speakers holding varying points on the Kashmir situation, in an effort to locate the problem within the larger discourse on identity, alienation and militarism. The second section Perspectives from Kashmir highlighted the voices of those women whose lives had been touched by the conflict. The ways in which their lives are affected by the insurgency, the impact on student and professional life, human rights and justice, health and trauma, were some of the issues that were explored. WISCOMP also invited speakers from NGOs in Kashmir, whose sensitive presentations on their efforts to rebuild civil society were greatly empowering for all present. The discussions brought together activists and scholars working in the field, including residents who have since fled from the Valley.

Regional Workshop
Women’s Initiative for peace in Nagaland and Sri Lanka
January 2001
Colombo, Sri Lanka
South Asian women have a successful track record of providing peace in their communities. Unfortunately, their skills are seldom utilized at the national or regional levels. An innovative project undertaken by Dr. Paula Bannerjee and supported by WISCOMP under the Scholar of Peace Fellowship Programme intends to encourage peace-making skills through a programme of dialogues. This workshop, which brought together Naga Peace activists and social scientists and their Sri Lankan counterparts, is the first in this series of dialogues. The participants came together on a common platform to share their experiences in waging peace in their conflict ravaged regions, discuss their contributions in furthering peace processes in situations of protracted conflict, and also to suggest ways for feminizing national security concerns. The workshop was organized by WISCOMP in collaboration with National Peace Council, Sri Lanka at Colombo.

The participants felt that dialogues and workshops should be organized frequently so that women can initiate networks for peace in South Asia, start multi-cultural women’s fact-finding missions in conflict areas that may be particularly sensitive to women specific crimes, organize women’s solidarity visits to express solidarity with other women living in conflict zones, create women’s international peace monitors to report on the situation of women and others, encourage women’s dialogue for understanding among warring factions such as a dialogue between parents of disappeared soldiers and parents of disappeared militants in the context of Sri Lanka and begin exchange of experiences for learning, policy making and building bridges of hope.

The participants made exposure visits to Trincomalee to interact with the Tamil refugees in camps and also to Kantale where they saw a unique income generation scheme for women which brings together Sinhala and Tamil women, united in their common efforts to earn a livelihood. It was suggested that in the next round, a group of women peace activists from Sri Lanka could visit India to take this initiative further.

Roundtable
Non-Military Variables of Security: Voices from Pakistan
February 13th, 2001
New Delhi
The Roundtable provided a forum in which the views of a group of young Pakistani scholars and professionals on the issue of human security were articulated.

While this Roundtable focussed on the specific human security concerns of Pakistan, it is perhaps important to bear in mind that these concerns are equally relevant to other South Asian states. India and Nepal in recent years have for instance, also had to handle the issue of refugees from neighbouring states. The issue of displaced persons is especially sensitive in South Asia, given the cross-cultural constituencies that transcend national boundaries. The challenge of sustainable development is another issue that cuts across territorial boundaries. Almost every single South Asian state has woken up to environmental concerns and constantly grapples with striking a balance between economic development and ecological imperatives. Given the low social and economic indicators in all states of South Asia there is a growing recognition of the necessity of moving towards a more holistic concept of national security – one which does not ignore military imperatives, but is not confined to it. It is in this context that the Roundtable assumed special significance.

Conflict Transformation Workshop
Rehumanising the other
June 4-12 2001
New Delhi
WISCOMP held a Conflict Transformation Workshop for university students from Pakistan and India, from June 4th to 12th, 2001, in New Delhi. The workshop was conceptualized as part of WISCOMP’s efforts to train a generation of peacebuilders in South Asia who will bring qualitatively different approaches to conflict resolution and peacebuilding in their work and striving. Titled Rehumanizing The Other, it facilitated the process of building bridges of trust, understanding and friendship between the next generation of citizens and potential leaders of the two countries. The interaction was organized in the belief that the transformation of the dominating conflict in South Asia lies, to a great extent, in the hands of third generation Indians and Pakistanis, and that people-to-people contacts must also include a dimension of substantive intellectual engagement with issues of peace and conflict.

The workshop was designed with two objectives in mind. One, that it would create a safe non-judgmental space for the opening of channels of communication to build relationships in ways that enable participants to move beyond prejudice and suspicion to understanding and trust. The second objective was to ground this weeklong interaction in an understanding of the theory and practice of Conflict Transformation. The workshop included a series of sessions on themes such as Conflict Analysis, Dialogue, Strategies and Tools for Building Peace, Negotiation and Mediation and Reconciliation and Rebuilding Trust. Annexure I contains further details.

The group comprised 40 university students in the age group of 20 to 26 years. The students from Pakistan represented institutions like the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (Karachi), Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lahore), Kinnaird College (Lahore), National College of Art (Lahore), University of Peshawar (Peshawar) and Sindh Medical College (Karachi). The participants from India were enrolled at the University of Delhi, Jamia Milia Islamia and Jawaharlal Nehru University. The sessions were conducted by conflict resolution trainers and facilitators from different regions including the United States, United Kingdom, Pakistan and India.

WISCOMP will set up an online dialogue group and newsletter to sustain and expand this constituency for peace. The second workshop has been tentatively scheduled for December 2002 in Pakistan.

Follow-up to Kashmir Roundtable
June 14-20 2001
New Delhi
A workshop and follow up meeting of the Roundtable on Women and Kashmir, in December 2000, was held from June 14th to 20th, 2001 in Srinagar. The meeting began with a sensitization workshop attended by the Roundtable participants from Jammu and Kashmir and WISCOMP representatives. Clinical psychologist Shobna Sonpar and social scientist Paula Banerjee shared their experiences in the field of psychological counselling and women building peace respectively. The idea was to expose the larger Roundtable group from Jammu and Kashmir to some of the developments in both these fields and their relevance for Kashmir.

The second component of the follow up was the setting up of a core group from among the larger Roundtable group consisting of seven members sufficiently reflective of the diversity of Jammu and Kashmir. This group of young people will, over the next two-an-a-half years, visit villages and districts affected by the conflict and will identify potential peace constituencies in the valley. The first trip of this core group to the valley is scheduled for September 2001. A third component of the workshop was a two-day interactive counselling session conducted by Shobna Sonpar. The objective was to empower and teach lay people specially women to relate and reach out to those in stress and those displaying signs of trauma.

WISCOMP SYMPOSIUM 2001
October 2001
New Delhi

Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP) will hold a symposium on Conflict Resolution: Trends and Prospects, in New Delhi, India, from 2nd to 9th October, 2001. The programme is intended for professionals, specially women, from varied backgrounds including academia, social movements, gender studies, peace and conflict studies, diplomacy, human rights, foreign affairs, defence and media, from the South Asian region.

Objective
The symposium affords young and mid-career professionals a stimulating opportunity to examine issues pertaining to conflict and its resolution in the specific context of South Asia. This is a programme meant for those who believe that women together with men need to engage more effectively in national and international fora in setting the agenda for responding to conflict. A gender perspective will, consequently be integral to the programme. The symposium will:

à Provide a multicultural environment in which participants learn from one another as well as from panelists and keynote speakers.

à Explore the crucial interface between conflict and gender issues.

à Build awareness and understanding of the potential of women in conflict resolution.

à Equip participants with the skills for better professional development in the new field of conflict resolution.

à Facilitate networking.

Programme
The symposium has an academic and professional orientation. It will comprise plenary lectures, panel discussions, skill building workshops, and reflection groups to enable participants to integrate the learning and skills acquired into their own work.
Plenary lectures and panel discussions will address issues such as:

à Interrogating Conflict: Challenges for South Asia in the New Millenium

à Conflict Resolution: Approaches and Skills

à Women and conflict –agency and victimhood

à Women and mass migrations in South Asia- internally displaced persons and refugees.

à Proliferation of small arms, terrorism, trafficking of women and children.

à Conflict Resolution and Multi Track Diplomacy

à Experiences and experiments in Conflict Resolution – A Global Perspective

The Learning Environment
The programme will be conducted in an informal and interactive manner. Resource persons will include scholars as well as activists from within and outside India. A plenary lecture will introduce the theme of the day. This will be followed by panel discussions linked to issues raised at the plenary. Interactive workshops in which participants undertake group work will also form an integral part of the programme. In addition, the programme will employ the audio-visual medium through documentary films to address specific issues. In an evaluation meeting participants will be requested to undertake a frank appraisal of all aspects of the symposium. The symposium will close with a valedictory address and a reception for participants with members of the larger community who work in related areas.

PUBLICATIONS
Redefining the Frame: Women Reporting Conflict
Mugdha Rai and Niloufer Afridi-Qazi
Working Paper 1
WISCOMP, 1999
Breaking the Silence: Women and Kashmir
Sumona DasGupta
WISCOMP, 2001

BUILDING LINKAGES
Women’s Peace Delegation to Pakistan
WISCOMP participated in the women’s peace delegation that visited Pakistan in March 2000 under the leadership of peace activist and former parliamentarian Nirmala Deshpande. The visit of the Indian delegation was organised by the Women’s Initiative for Peace in South Asia (WIPSA), a coalition of women’s rights activists and groups. The delegation had a three point agenda: to work towards nuclear disarmament in South Asia and the world, initiate a dialogue on Kashmir and bring down the inflated defence budgets of the two countries. At the end of the visit, several human rights and women’s groups on both sides of the border passed a joint statement that called for a change in the educational curricula (particularly in schools) of both countries, freer access to each other’s print media, relaxation in granting of visas, and greater responsibility on the part of the media when reporting on the issues of contention between the two countries. In May this year, a group of women from Pakistan led by noted human rights activist Asma Jahangir, visited Delhi.

Networking with The Hague Appeal for Peace Initiatives
In the last one year, WISCOMP has been working closely with several initiatives at The Hague Appeal for Peace, The Hague. These include: The Women Building Peace Campaign, International Alert (London); Women Peacemakers Program, International Fellowship of Reconciliation (Netherlands); Peace Education Campaign (The Hague), Abolition 2000, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (Santa Barbara, USA) and The Coalition for an International Criminal Court (New York, USA).

The Women Building Peace Campaign in London aims at enhancing the role of women in peace building processes by equipping them with the expertise and ability to engage in conflict prevention and reconstructing societies torn by conflict. In addition to being a member of the Campaign, WISCOMP is networking with several women’s and human rights groups in South Asia to spread awareness about this initiative and seek support for the key areas of concern.

Abolition 2000, a campaign working toward the formulation of a treaty to phase out nuclear weapons within a specified time frame by the year 2000, has been endorsed by WISCOMP. WISCOMP is also in touch with citizen action groups in the South Asian region that comprise the Abolition 2000 network. The Coalition for an International Criminal Court is working towards the establishment of a criminal court that will have the teeth to bring to justice individuals who commit the most serious violations of international humanitarian law. In addition to being a member of this network, WISCOMP has also assisted the Coalition in their public service announcement campaign for the Criminal Court in the Indian electronic media.

The Global Peace Education Campaign was also launched at The Hague last year. As a member of this campaign, WISCOMP participated at the Conference of International Institutes on Peace Education in Pune in July 2000.

WISCOMP Fellows for the year 2001-02 are
1. Mangalika de Silva
Researcher
Social Scientists Association
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Project Title: Soldiers, Prisoners, princes and Prostitues: Violence and Sexuality in the Iconography of the Nation
2. Zafarullah Khan
Journalist
Green Press
Islamabad, Pakistan
Project Title: Representation of Post-Chagai Alternative Security Discourse in the Media
3. Jeff Redding
Visiting Research Fellow
Sustainable Development Policy Institute
Islamabad, Pakistan
Project Title: Feminist Litigation Patterns in Pakistan
4. Bina Srinivasan
Founder
Swaashraya
Baroda, Gujarat, India
Project Title: Gender and Involuntary Displacement: Policy and Resistance Movements
5. Dipanjali Bakshi
Engineer
Indian Air Force
Bangalore, India
Project Title: In the Line of Fire - Women in the Armed Forces
6. Bashir Manzar
Editor
Kashmir Images
Srinagar, Kashmir, India
Project Title: Impact of Violence on Media: Print Media in Kashmir
7. Manimala
Freelance Journalist
New Delhi, India
Project Title: Language of Peace in the World of Violence - Strength of Women Survivors of Armed Conflicts in Sri Lanka and Kashmir
8. Sharmina Nasrin
Research Associate
Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Project Title: Conflict Resolution and Peacemaking: The Case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Crisis
9. Chitra Balakrishnan
Alternative Law Forum
Bangalore, India
Project Title: Gender Sensitive and Culture Specific Models in Alternative Dispute Resolution
10. Smita Bharti
Deputy Director
Katha
New Delhi, India
Project Title: Women Under Trials in Tihar Jail

SCHOLARS OF PEACE
Fellowships for the first cycle were awarded in June 2000. The Fellows will employ various media including the visual and print medium and dialogue groups, to develop alternative perspectives in the fields of conflict transformation and multi-track peace initiatives.
The fellows for the 2000-01 cycle and their areas of research are given below.
Academic Research
1. Khatoli Khala, Kohima, Nagaland
Ph.D scholar at the Central Asian Studies Division, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Project Title: "Armed Forces Special Power Act (AFSPA) and its Impact on Violence Against Women in Nagaland."
2. Sabina Kidwai, New Delhi
Lecturer, Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.
Project Title: "Images of Muslim Women: Formation and Transformation of Identity Among Muslim Women."
3. Bhabananda Tahellambam, Imphal, Manipur
Specialist in Chinese Studies
Project Title: "Women’s Uprising in Manipur – A Legacy Continued."
Special Projects
4. Paula Banerjee, Calcutta, West Bengal
Senior lecturer in History, Sarojini Naidu College for Women, University of Calcutta
Project Title: "Facilitation of a Women’s Dialogue for Peace in South Asia"
5. Sonia Jabbar, Kashmir / New Delhi
Freelance Journalist, Photographer, Installation Artist and Women’s Rights Activist
Project Title: "Women’s Voices from Kashmir."
Media Projects
6. Alladi Jayasri, Bangalore, Karnataka
Senior Reporter, The Hindu, Bangalore
Project Title: "Empowerment of Women: Answers from Tibet."
7. Sudha Ramachandran, Bangalore, Karnataka
Assistant Editor, Deccan Herald, Bangalore.
Project Title: "Giving Voices to the Valley: The Women of Kashmir."
8. Amita Joshi, New Delhi
Freelance Journalist writing for publications in Hindi
Project Title: "The Language of Conflict and Women in Assam."
WISCOMP SCHOLAR OF PEACE FELLOWSHIPS 2001-2002
Fellowships for the second cycle were awarded in July 2001. A selection panel comprising four members of the advisory board and consultative committee of WISCOMP screened the proposals and shortlisted seventeen candidates. Ten South Asians have been awarded the Fellowship for the year 2001-2002.