WFWPI UN Office-Vienna Intern Series: Bottom-up Approaches To Implement the Women, Peace and Security Agenda In Nagorno-Karabakh

Written by: Claudia Ditel

This year marks the 21st anniversary of the United Nations Security Council resolution (UNSCR) 1325, which launched the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. The WPS agenda addresses the impact of the war on women and stresses the importance of women’s equal engagement in conflict transformation, in addition to the need of protecting women and girls from conflict-related violence.

To date, the resolution remains not sufficiently implemented in many areas in the world affected by conflict. One of these areas include Nagorno-Karabakh, in South Caucasus, which is an unrecognized, de facto, autonomous Republic within the territory of Azerbaijan, although it is composed entirely by Armenians. The first war was fought in the early 1990s and ended with the occupation by Armenian troops of seven regions surrounding the small Nagorno-Karabakh, generating around 700,000 Azeri Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). The conflict remained frozen until September 2020, when Azerbaijan launched an offensive. The November 9 ceasefire opened the way for the progressive reopening of borders and implementation of infrastructural projects across the region.

However, so far the negotiation process falls short of involving communities in the peacebuilding process. Women in particular remain marginalized, yet they experience the conflict on many levels, as victims not only of the direct effects of the protracted conflict but also of the indirect effects. Displaced women are living in temporary hosting facilities with poor sanitary conditions and scarce gender-sensitive humanitarian assistance. They are not able to come back anytime soon in the reoccupied territories due to the presence of landmines. In addition to that, many women lost their children, husbands and family members in the last conflict. As described in the 2019 Kvinna Till Kvinna report, women are used to taking on greater burden to provide for the family’s income after the man’s loss or injury and face economic insecurity. Some women are forced to turn to survival strategies, such as prostitution or smuggling of illegal goods, while young girls risk to be victims of early marriages.

Eventually, conflicts generate highly militarized societies, which are based on a patriarchal culture and strong gender stereotypes. It is not by chance that Armenia and Azerbaijan present two of the highest sex ratios at birth in the world, due to male preference. Moreover, the military sector draws resources from the welfare sector. Hospitals but also shelters and hotline services for victims of domestic violence suffer from lack of resources. Yet, the Caucasus registers alarming rates of domestic violence and still conservative forces in Azerbaijan and Armenia halt the ratification of the 2011 Istanbul Convention Against Violence Against Women. Unsurprisingly, feminists and pacifist activists in both countries advocate for the ratification of the Istanbul Convention and the construction of a culture of peace.
In sum, the protracted conflict exacerbates women’s marginalization and violence against women, generating a continuum of violence even after a ceasefire. Women usually elaborate an anti-nationalist narrative to the extent that they refuse patriarchy and the war. This suggests that women’s narrative constitutes a powerful point of belonging across the borders. For this reason, it is important to create safe spaces and opportunities for women to engage in an inter-ethnic dialogue. The international community should enhance peace and reconciliation by creating peace zones for meeting each other to create circles for information sharing and support to women.

Bottom-up approaches can create opportunities for women to become the protagonists of grassroots initiatives, possibly income generating, to empower women and to overtake the women-as-victims paradigm. Communities of practices should be implemented to the design of gender sensitive and concrete development projects, in which local women from both sides are engaged in activities of common interest, such as small-scale business, resources management, mine risk education, environmental protection or early warning system mechanism for victims of violence.
Peacebuilding is not only implemented in high-level meetings and conferences. Peace, trust and dialogue are built by the grassroots population first and foremost. Bottom-up approaches could constitute a promising and innovative path toward the localization of the WPS agenda in places where it falls short of being implemented. This would not only be beneficial for the economic security and the knowledge agency of women themselve, but it would be advantageous also for the security of entire communities.

The 2015 Global Study on the implementation of UNSCR 1325 conducted by UN Women proves that women’s participation increases the probability of a peace agreement lasting at least two years by 20 percent, and by 35 percent, the probability of a peace agreement lasting 15 years. Hence, investing in women in Armenia and Azerbaijan is not only a matter of justice but also a potential for conflict transformation.