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Jelena Djokovic
Woman in Peacebuilding. The Role of Serbian Women’s Peace Organisations
in “Dealing with the Past” (DWP) Processes
1. Introduction
It has always been more than obvious that the work of women in crisis prevention and conflict
management remains invisible or virtually un-acknowledged. As Donna Pankhurst says, most
approaches to peacebuilding have either ignored or marginalised issues of gender and women.
Women consistently remain a minority among participants in peacebuilding projects.
This essay’s topic, the Balkan region, is a case in point. Balkan women are involved to a great
extent in realising sustainable peace in the Balkan region, yet they are still not given official
acknowledgement. In response to this situation, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325
on October 31 in 2000. The resolution aimed at “[r]eaffirming the important role of women in the
prevention and resolution of conflicts and in peace-building, and stressing the importance of their
equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace
and security, and the need to increase their role in decision-making with regard to conflict
prevention and resolution [and] calls on all actors involved, when negotiating and implementing
peace agreements, to adopt a gender perspective, including, inter alia: Measures that support local
women's peace initiatives and indigenous processes for conflict resolution, and that involve women
in all of the implementation mechanisms of the peace agreements”.
My work focuses on the gender aspects of peacebuilding work, and more precisely on the role of
women in forwarding the concept of Dealing With the Past (DWP) as an important part of broader
peacebuilding. Thus, the central question of my research is: In what specific ways can women
contribute to the process of DWP?
The methodological approach of this work is based both on peacebuilding literature and on
literature on the role of women in peace processes, with special emphasis on the DWP concept as
well as on empirical data (14 interviews in different women’s peace organisations in Belgrade).
The concept of Dealing With the Past (DWP) consists of the following main elements: international
and national courts, reparations, lustration, truth and reconciliation commissions, education, and
different healing methods.
2. Theory
Post-conflict peacebuilding is a concept for the reduction of hostile perceptions in the aftermath of
war as a means to prevent further conflicts. It tries to maintain the newly-attained peaceful
conditions.
The term ‘post-conflict peacebuilding’ was created in 1992 by the then-UN General Secretary
Boutros Boutros Gali, based on Johan Galtung’s theory on peacebuilding. Since then, the term has
appeared frequently in diplomatic, political and even military discourses, especially as no less than
93 percent of major conflicts since the early 1990s have been intrastate conflicts, which often do
not end after a peace agreement has been signed. Often the causes of conflict remain and can
produce further conflicts. In those cases pressure from the international community is usually
necessary to promote peacebuilding.
Because of the continual nature of these new intrastate conflicts, the term ‘post-conflict
peacebuilding’ is no longer accurate, and a new concept should be discussed: “We should not use
the term ‘post-conflict.’ Conflicts in fact do not end, but they change (...) Therefore the best term is
probably ‘post-agreement’ or ‘post-settlement work’ – as in for example ‘post-settlement political,
economic and social work” (Fitzduff 2003, in Austin 2004:375).
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