General Women, Peace and Security

Former Irish President Mary Robinson was just making polite conversation when she asked an Ethiopian teenager about her wedding day.

The 16-year-old had already been married a year.

"She looked at me with the saddest eyes and said, 'I had to drop out of school,'" Robinson said in a telephone interview.

An Indonesian woman has won a United Nations Development Program-sponsored peace award for helping to build peace and prevent conflict in North Maluku.

Electronita Duan, from Halmahera, was awarded the N-PEACE award along with fellow peace advocates Filomena Barros dos Reis of East Timor, Purna Shova Chitrakar of Nepal and Shreen Abdul Saroor of Sri Lanka.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, Leymah Gbowee, founder of Women in Peacebuilding Program/West African Network for Peacebuilding and Tawakkul Karman, journalist and peace activist from Yemen shares this years Nobel Peace Prize.

Abigail Disney, an award-winning documentarian and Stanford alumna, spoke on Wednesday evening in the Cemex Auditorium on her documentary work illuminating the role of women in conflict and peace. Her mini-series titled “Women, War and Peace,” which premiered on PBC this week, explores women's roles in conflict situations, specifically in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Liberia.

This week's national election in Liberia came on the heels of last week's announcement that two of the three Nobel Peace Prize recipients this year are women from Liberia — current President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and peace activist Leymah Gbowee. B.

The pursuit of equal rights for women has been broadened in recent years with the growing recognition that the empowerment of women plays a vital role in the restoration of peace in societies divided by conflict and war. This is not a simplistic matter of men making war and women making peace, of one sex's aggressive drives being moderated by the other's supposedly gentler instincts.

If an American television network were going to be in cahoots with the Nobel committee, it makes sense that it would be PBS. How else to explain the premiere of the mini-series “Women, War & Peace” on Tuesday, just days after one of its major figures, the Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee, shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 2011?

Following a remarkable year in the promotion of gender equality and women's empowerment that was marked by the establishment of UN-Women and the launch of the Secretary-General's Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health, it was now time to turn the momentum generated in 2010 into clear, tangible gains for women and girls everywhere, the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) was told today.

Maj Britt Theorin, the president of Operation 1325 met with Finnish Secretary of State and saw a chance to put UNSCR 1325 on the Finnish agenda, and encourage an appointment of a Finnish Ambassador on 1325.

The meeting took place on September 29 in connection to the *conference “North to North – Women as Agents of Change.

The Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, has made clear that the only way that we can tackle the worst problems facing the world today – including in conflict affected countries – is by "putting women to the front and centre of all our efforts".