A gender specific approach to peace-building in Sudan

by Julia Aker Duany, PhD

Executive Summary

Can ordinary, village women in south Sudan overcome the power of the AK-47? They did in Upper Nile in 1994, when the collaborative, indigenous peace-building initiative now known as the People-to-People Peace Process (P2P Peace Process) stopped inter-ethnic violence in the region. It was the women who led the way, tapping into their underlying influence within the family and community. The P2P Peace Process highlights the importance of finding ways to strengthen the role of grassroots women in peace-building processes.

South Sudanese Friends International (SSFI) has developed a way-a personal development program to teach ways of thinking and behaving that create a climate for change, encourage individual responsibility, build supportive networks, and encourage women to teach other women what they are learning. Its first year, the program will train a network of 180 to 210 village women. Thirty villages will be represented in each of south Sudan's three regions. The trained women will serve as local trainers, or "peace advocates," teaching other women how to use the influence they already have in their homes and in their communities to build peace and stability in harmonious and positive ways. Each year, more women will be trained, and those who have received training will be offered follow-up seminars.

If a few village women in the Upper Nile Region can bring hostile groups together, imagine what a network of hundreds, and someday thousands, of women across south Sudan can do.

Problem Statement

What might happen in south Sudan if ordinary women became effective peace advocates? Are there ways that women could diminish the inter-ethnic violence that is destroying Sudan's future hope? What can village women do that international peace initiatives cannot?

In 1994, I saw what ordinary village women can do. That was the year I became involved in a collaborative, indigenous peace-building initiative that succeeded in stopping inter-ethnic violence in the Upper Nile Region of South Sudan. That initiative-the Akobo Peace Accord-marked the beginning of the grassroots movement in Sudan now known as the People-to-People Peace Process (P2P Peace Process). By the end of 1999, the P2P Peace Process had halted years of escalating violence among the Nuer and Dinka.

During the early years of the P2P Peace Process, what really caught my attention was the way women played a key behind-the-scene role in initiating, building, and maintaining the peace.

How did these women overcome the power of the AK-47? In Upper Nile in 1994, inter-ethnic warfare over shared fishing and grazing areas was visiting horrific suffering upon women and children. This was the situation that led my husband Wal and I to start South Sudanese Friends International, Inc. (SSFI). At first, we believed that a peace agreement between the rival Liberation Movement leaders would stop the violence. But our efforts to bring these men together changed nothing. Armed violence on the grassroots level continued to escalate.

In desperation, I began telling the village women to urge their husbands, fathers and brothers to stop fighting. To everyone's surprise, the women discovered that they had an underlying influence within the community that was powerful enough to move entire groups toward reconciliation.

The women discovered that when they stopped reacting like helpless victims and took action on the individual level, their circumstances began to improve. One woman refused to milk the cow her husband had stolen. He ended up returning the cow, breaking the cycle of retaliatory violence. The events at Akobo showed me that ordinary women can counter the culture of the gun by creating a "culture of peace-building."

The problem is finding ways to strengthen the role of women in grassroots peace-building.

Needs Assessment

Studying women in conflict situations in East Africa has taught me that one of my strengths as a researcher and peace advocate comes from the fact that I am an East African woman. The local women regard me as "one of them," and I hear information that would otherwise be withheld from "outsiders." My understanding of the women is based upon a lifetime of experience within East Africa's cultural and linguistic context. My work serves as a "bridge" - a vital link-both enhancing the existing work of researchers and NGOs and revealing avenues for new project initiatives with practical applications.

The introduction of field-tested methods that encourage collective community action in initiating and taking ownership of reconciliation processes and subsequent peace-building should effect a shift in policy making from a top-down approach to one that moves from the grassroots-upwards. Since women have traditionally been the "bridge builders" between East African ethnic communities through marriage arrangements, the shift will involve women in the processes.

In general, peace initiatives in East Africa are either coordinated or funded by individuals and organizations external to the region. The initiatives are either conducted or controlled by a cadre of elite individuals. The elite may be East African, but they live in isolation from the grassroots people in the conflict zones. These initiatives lack vision and follow-up action, and in general neither involve grassroots people (and certainly not grassroots women) nor deliver any tangible benefit to them.

Program Activities

Goals: Strengthening the role of women in grassroots peace-building, must start with individual women-teaching them to lead by example in:

• Creating an environment that encourages change. The people of south Sudan are open to new ideas, but they do not want changes forced upon them. As women understand that improvement begins with "changing yourself first," they will practice new behaviors to counter violence. This can be as simple as avoiding negative language, blaming, or accusing. It can be as complex as learning to re-frame the problem. The "culture of the gun" is an example. Before the war, when a young man was initiated, he was given a spear, a community symbol of trust and responsibility. A man carried his spear responsibly. He did not abuse, plunder, rape, or murder. Those who made the AK-47 a symbol of revolutionary destruction did away with responsible action. Women can re-frame this problem by encouraging men to question why they are using their guns to terrorize their own people. Instead of being forced to give up their guns, seeing the gun in a new way changes the reason for bearing arms. The men begin to see the logic of using guns as they had once used the spear, for self-defense. This happened in Akobo.
• Creating a sense of individual responsibility. In an environment that encourages (not forces) change from within, women and men are free to come to the recognition that the damage of inter-ethnic violence is not something that is being done to them, but is something they are doing to themselves. They can accept responsibility for their actions. Women can learn to reason with their husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers in ways that appeal to their shared sense of social responsibility-a responsibility not for killing, but for saving lives.
• Creating a climate of mutual trust and cooperation. Building networks and a sense of common cause among the women of south Sudan is important to strengthening the linkages that bind families and communities through marriage. Linkages play into the activities and relationships of daily life: food production, trade, health care, education, marriage, children, and especially reconciliation.

Objective: SSFI is launching Phase I of a personal development program. The program is unique, because we are reaching into key areas of south Sudan, teaching women ways of thinking and behaving that create a climate for change, encourage individual responsibility, build supportive networks, and encourage them to teach other women what they are learning.

How am I so sure that women in rural south Sudan will accept the challenge for personal change?

In south Sudan, the potential that exists in communities for countering conflict and ethnic violence is limited severely by the lack of information coming in from the outside world. But the potential is there. Word of new ideas from the P2P Peace Process travels informally by word of mouth. The result is an increasing receptivity among grassroots people toward innovations in peace-building. Women frequently are the most receptive.

South Sudanese women are devastated from nearly twenty years of war-from the violence that destroys husband, children, and a total way of life. They are open to change, and they have a collective social capacity to effect change. When given in marriage, women link families across community and, sometimes, ethnic lines. Women are at the center of Sudanese family-life. As the center and as a link, women acquire an intimate knowledge of relationships in the broader community. In learning to use this knowledge for the common good, as women in Akobo discovered, they can break the chain of armed inter-ethnic violence link by link.

SSFI's personal development program for women is a life-long learning process that gives individual grassroots women the personal skills they need to improve the quality of family and community life. SSFI's personal development program for women will take shape in phases. It is not a "quick-fix." It is a long-term process of change "from the inside out" that begins with and builds upon women's every day lives.

The foundation of SSFI's personal development program is a basic workshop on practical personal skills for daily living. These skills include: learning to see familiar circumstances in new ways; changing yourself first; identifying desired results; finding win-win solutions; inter-personal communication skills; leading by example; and strategies for collaborative action. I have already field-tested the methods and major elements of the program.

During Phase I, SSFI will work in cooperation with local institutions and organizations to schedule basic workshops in key communities in south Sudan. I will facilitate two workshops in each of the three regions of south Sudan: Bahr el Ghazal, Equatoria, and Upper Nile. I speak local languages, Arabic, or English where appropriate. Each workshop will train 30-35 women-representing about 15 different villages, each sending two women.

The basic workshop will teach women how to use the influence they already have in their homes and in their communities to build peace and stability in harmonious and positive ways. It will instill a sense of ownership over the peace-building process, a sense that has been totally lacking at the grassroots level.

Each basic workshop will last two weeks. (A two-week workshop would be out of the question for women in the United States, but it will work in south Sudan.) Many of the Sudanese women will walk for a day or more just to reach the workshop site. And the two weeks of learning together will nurture bonds of friendship, trust, and support for a common cause. These bonds will form the basis of network-building, a key part of the personal development and peace-building process.

One of the primary obstacles to village women's involvement in the community-at-large is the inability to communicate and negotiate effectively. The training the women will receive in inter-personal communication skills will both enhance their ability to step forward and speak to their interests and will empower them to teach the workshop skills to other women. Because many of these women are illiterate, I will reinforce key concepts with simple visual aids.

Each workshop participant will receive a kit to help her share what she has learned with the women in her home village. The kits will contain visual aids for teaching key concepts and supplies for initiating small-scale self-reliance projects. SSFI's self-reliance projects include vegetable gardening, fishing, poultry, and clean water. The projects reinforce the value of working together for the common good, and strengthen the peace-building process by bringing home an immediate, tangible benefit to the community.

During the twelve months of Phase I, SSFI will plant an initial network of 180 to 210 trained "peace advocates" reaching out to women in at least 90 villages in south Sudan. As the program moves into its second year (Phase II), I will repeat the process of training groups of 30-35 women in regional basic workshops.

But our goal is to multiply the effectiveness of the women over the long-term. That's why during Phase II, I will hold follow-up seminars for the initial network of 180 to 210 women. Follow-up seminars will incorporate refresher courses, program evaluation, program improvements, and expansion of the self-reliance projects.

By the end of Phase II, I hope to identify one or two women whom I will mentor through a series of trainer's workshops. At this point, I am allowing a year for the mentoring process. When the trainees graduate, they will be able to facilitate basic workshops on their own. This will be Phase III of the program: the multiplication phase. During the first year of Phase III, we will at least double the number of women we are teaching and following-up. I also will begin mentoring one or two more women through the trainer's workshops. Eventually, the new facilitators will also become mentors.

You can see what is happening. Through the dynamic of women teaching women and through the magic of multiplication, one day the behaviors of peace-building and self-reliance will become part of everyday life in south Sudan. And while the program targets women, the family and the community-at-large are the ultimate beneficiaries.

Evaluation

The purpose of evaluation is not to focus attention on numbers of women trained, but rather to continually improve the effectiveness of the program and to challenge the participants toward deeper personal growth.

Internally, primary program evaluation will occur during Phase II, in focus groups of basic workshop participants during the Follow-up workshops. Secondary evaluation will include feedback from local organizations, NGOs, and other agencies in a position to observe the results of the program activities.

Externally, on the institutional level, the teaching tools resulting from program evaluation will help the researchers, government agencies, non-governmental agencies (NGOs), and indigenous groups involved in conflict resolution processes learn to shape and to share collaborative reconciliation and peace-building strategies that are harmonious with local cultural norms. This learning will represent a fundamental shift in approach, placing the sense of ownership of the processes where it belongs: with the Sudanese people.

The introduction of field-tested methods that encourage community action in initiating and taking ownership of reconciliation processes and peace-building should also effect a shift in policy making from a top-down approach to one that moves from the grassroots-upwards. Since women have traditionally been the "bridge builders" between East African ethnic communities through marriage arrangements, this paradigm shift will include women in the processes.

Timetable

Due to security concerns, the workshop dates must be kept flexible. This schedule will be adapted according to the seasons and the security conditions in each region.

Phase I - June 1, 2001 - May 30, 2002

2 basic workshops in Upper Nile
2 basic workshops in Equatoria
2 basic workshops in Bahr el-Ghazal

Phase II - June 1, 2002 - May 30, 2003

Begin trainer's workshop
2 basic workshops and 1 follow-up seminar in Upper Nile
2 basic workshops and 1 follow-up seminar in Equatoria
2 basic workshops and 1 follow-up seminar in Bahr el-Ghazal

Present project paper at annual meeting of African Studies Association - November 2002

Phase III - June 1, 2003 - May 30, 2004

4 basic workshops and 1 follow-up seminar in Upper Nile
4 basic workshops and 1 follow-up seminar in Equatoria
4 basic workshops and 1 follow-up seminar in Bahr el-Ghazal

Budget

Analysis of the funding required for this project is available on request from SSFI