WMC News & Features

Women World Leaders Reassess Security

“Global security” tends to conjure up “fighting terrorism,” conditioned as we are by the media and government. But last fall, the International Women Leaders Global Security Summit (New York City, November 15 to 17) brought another kind of thinking to this crucial subject.

“Human security cannot be separated from human dignity,” said Madeleine Albright, former U.S. secretary of state, addressing the high-powered audience. “It is our duty to speak up for those women across the globe who lack their own platform to do so."

Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and co-host of the event, said it was “the first summit to commit to harnessing the collective power” of women leaders to address human security issues. They came from some 30 countries—about 80 women including current and past heads of governments and ministers as well as UN officials, NGO representatives, philanthropists, academics, and a few businesswomen.

Participants in the summit emphasized that security has a human face, and some speakers made it clear what was at stake. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council—who addressed one of four focus issues, the security threat of climate change—said the Arctic stands as sentinel for the rest of the world on global warming. She described how in Arctic communities, as in small island states around the world, entire cultures hang in the balance.

The summit organizers believe women approach global security differently from their male counterparts. Said co-host and former Canadian prime minister Kim Cambell, the “interconnected complexity” of today’s world “requires the kind of consensus-building” and human focus “that women excel at.” A “leadership gap” needs to be bridged in order to bring real security to the world, said Marie Wilson of the White House Project, one of the meeting’s partner organizations.

The concept embraced by these leaders depends not on the “hard security” of military buildup and response but on securing basic human rights to safe and sufficient food and water, health, and personal safety—as spelled out more than a dozen years ago in a UN Human Development Report. Specifically, the summit addressed four interconnected areas of global security:

  • The Economics of Insecurity—Higher standards of living have spread unevenly, leaving people in poverty, particularly in developing countries, with hunger, water shortages, unemployment, environmental degradation, poor or unstable governance, personal and political threats to safety.
  • Climate Change—Melting sea ice, rising sea levels, more droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornados, extreme weather conditions, and loss of species are already occurring. Temperatures will continue to increase unless action is taken immediately to radically cut CO2 emissions to slow change and prevent catastrophe.
  • The Responsibility to Protect—States have an obligation to protect civilians from genocide and other crimes against humanity, including rape and other violence specifically directed at women.
  • Responses to Terrorism—“Terrorism” needs to be defined carefully, with attention to root causes, and met with appropriate responses that respect the rule of law and protect human rights.

In urging a transfer of priorities, summit participants argued that when “soft security” problems like economic inequality and protection of natural resources are neglected, they may become the cause of “hard security” violence igniting military force. Liberia is a case in point. Speaker Olubanke King-Akerele, Liberian minister of foreign affairs, explained how her fragile democracy struggles to recover from a brutal civil war waged under Charles Taylor. Africa’s first woman president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, elected largely through the voting power of poor market women, appointed women to important cabinet posts, including the commerce and finance ministries as well as foreign affairs. They oversee a shift in values, where, with the help of foundations and NGOs, programs attempt to attend to the country’s traumatized people, including former child soldiers and girls and women who have been subjected to sexual violence.

Robinson, in her closing remarks as co-host, commented, "We hoped we would hear something new at this summit, and I think we did.” In addition to signing a Call to Action, the summit, under Robinson’s leadership, took immediate action on one of the four focus areas: it issued a “Responsibility to Protect” statement recommending ways to strengthen a proposal condemning rape and sexual violence that has just been voted on by the UN General Assembly.

As Carol Jenkins, moderator for the Friday and Saturday plenaries, and WMC president, remarked, it was thrilling to see such vibrant women in one room as a “critical mass.” June Zeitlin, participating in the summit as director of WEDO (the Women’s Economic Development Organization), thought it was a promising sign that the group addressed climate change as a matter of global security. It’s hard to measure the effects of networking at such an event—a rare occasion when politicians and civil servants mix with NGO personnel and philanthropists and invited experts—but the sewing has begun.

The summit was part of an initiative launched in October 2006, running through June of this year, by the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, partnering with the White House Project, the Council of Women World Leaders, and the Women Leaders Intercultural Forum. 



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