General Women, Peace and Security

For the sake of Libyan society as a whole, women must play a more equal and visible role in shaping it.

Following weeks of tumult and protests in North Africa and the Middle East, I could not have been more honored to lead my 16 female colleagues in the U.S. Senate in emphasizing the importance of women's rights and political participation. As one unified voice, the 17 of us introduced a resolution calling for women's rights as leaders in North Africa and the Middle East consider constitutional reforms and shape new governments.

During a recent interview with Newsweek magazine in response to the nascent women's-rights movement in Egypt, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, "I believe that the rights of women and girls is the unfinished business of the 21st century. We see women and girls across the world who are oppressed and violated and demeaned and degraded and denied so much of what they are entitled to as our fellow human beings."

With the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, in 1999, the international community agreed on stepping up its efforts to integrate women in peace building and security processes. Eleven years later, most of the commitments made remain to be realised, as a recently published report concludes.

Puntland a semi-autonomous state of Somalia's president Abdirahman Mohamed (Farole) opened third Somali women Annual conference in Garowe, the capital city of the state on Monday, Radio Garowe reports.

The U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan should be brought to a halt because it has solidified, rather than weakened, oppression against women in her home country, Afghan human rights activist Malalai Joya said Saturday.

I. Less than ten kilometres from Bhubaneswar is Dhaulagiri, site of an Asokan edict associated with his renunciation of war. The legend is that Asoka was the archetypal ambitious, ruthless and even fratricidal prince whose brutal wars savaged their victims. The war with Kalinga was no exception. Asoka, moved to remorse at the sight of the destruction he had wrought, is said to have foresworn violence.

Recent media reports have focused on the stalled progress for women in Afghanistan and the shift in the international community's focus as they take steps towards an eventual military withdrawl. Although there's much work to be done, it's important to note that there has been tangible improvement for women in Afghanistan. A decade ago, women weren't allowed to go out in public alone.

An extraordinarily powerful documentary, CALLING THE GHOSTS is the first-person account of two women caught in a war where rape was as much an everyday weapon as bullets or bombs. Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac, childhood friends and lawyers, enjoyed the lives of "ordinary modern women" in Bosnia-Herzegovina until one day former neighbors became tormentors.