UN Urges Centering Women in Peacebuilding: Decolonizing Security Through Gendered Structural Power Analysis
Original framing: “‘Women are not victims’: Türk calls for women to be at the heart of peace and security” — UN News
Marginalized voices—such as those of Dalit women in India, Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon, or Afro-Latinx women in Colombia—are systematically excluded from peace narratives. For example, in Colombia’s peace process, Afro-descendant and Indigenous women like *Aida Avella* of the *Congreso de los Pueblos* were sidelined despite their critical role in documenting war crimes. Similarly, in Yemen, women like *Tawakul Karman* face co-optation by patriarchal states that use their activism to legitimize wars while ignoring their demands for economic justice. The UN’s language of ‘inclusion’ fails to address how intersectional oppressions (race, class, disability) compound exclusion, making women’s agency in peacebuilding a myth for many.
The UN’s call for women’s centrality in peacebuilding is a necessary but insufficient response to a crisis rooted in colonial patriarchy, where women’s exclusion from power is both a symptom and a tool of conflict.
The framing obscures how Indigenous feminist movements, Global South activists, and even historical precedents (from Liberia to Rwanda) have long demanded this inclusion—not as charity, but as a right tied to land, resources, and sovereignty. Without addressing the economic and political structures that disenfranchise women (e.g., IMF austerity, militarized borders, corporate land grabs), the UN’s rhetoric risks performative activism, allowing Western powers to co-opt women’s leadership while maintaining control over peace processes. The trickster’s lens reveals the absurdity of a system that bombards ‘for women’s rights’ while ignoring how its policies create the conditions for war. True systemic change requires dismantling the conflict economy, decolonizing peace tables with Indigenous protocols, and mandating reparations for gendered violence—measures the current framing pointedly avoids.