Women, Peace and Security Champion Profile: Professor Miriam Coronel Ferrer

This is the first champion profile linked to UN Women’s 2025 desktop calendar marking 25 years of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Asia and the Pacific. The series begins with a world-renowned peace mediator-negotiator from the Philippines, Prof. Miriam Coronel Ferrer.

In 2014, as the Chief Negotiator for the Government of the Philippines-Moro Islamic Liberation Front Peace Process, Prof. Coronel Ferrer became the first female chief negotiator in the world to sign a final peace accord with a non-state armed group. As co-founder of the South-East Asian Women Peace Mediators and former member of the UN Standby Team of Mediation Experts, she has supported mediation and peacebuilding initiatives, and the inclusion of women and youth in mediation and peace processes in different parts of the world.

Today, what does the Women, Peace and Security agenda mean to you?

“The 25 years since UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was passed have really generated a lot of momentum for more women to be given the spaces where they can be part of the solution. The shining light is really on the grassroots initiatives. Women continue, on a daily basis in their own communities, trying to build consensus. That's the momentum that has been sustained. 

Right now, the peace and security situation is volatile in a lot of countries, which has been quite polarizing. This means that the gender agenda has suffered. Just think about the protection issues that confront us with all these wars. If there are no real high-level political negotiations that are prospering, how can you even talk about women's participation? 

Do I get frustrated? Yes, definitely, but it doesn't mean the work should stop. I mean the demand is much, much more for more women to be involved in peace and security. I think the basic frustration has to do with the fact that a lot of cultural biases are still there. Even the fact that the first woman to actually sign a peace agreement with an armed group happened in the 21st century – in the second decade of the 21^st century – is itself already telling of where society is, in so far as providing equal participation and acknowledgment of the capabilities of women.

But the greater frustration is really on the peace component. The whole idea with the Women, Peace and Security agenda is really to work for peace; to acknowledge that women can be active campaigners against the weapons of war. Yet, we’re seeing the arms race. Resources are being put into weapons. Of course, there are attempts at ceasefire dialogues, but they aren’t really working. So how can you even get to the brass tacks of implementing a ceasefire, to putting women in these processes and creating all the mechanisms that are supposed to be part of it?”

What is your view of the progress and remaining challenges on achieving peace and security in the Bangsamoro region?

“I'm very happy that I'm seeing more civil society organizations on-the-ground in the Bangsamoro region, and a lot more active women. I still interact with them occasionally, including with the different civil society stalwarts and the new ones who have come up.  I meet with some people who are still in government as perhaps they feel I can give insights that would be useful in the implementation stage.  

It doesn't mean the problems are all solved. It’s never a perfect post-agreement phase. Nowhere in the world do you not have problems after signing a peace agreement. Most peace agreements broke down after a few years, even after five years or seven years. I'm just glad that we’re still there. 

On the gender issue, one factor is that we had a large contingent of women in our panel, our technical working groups and our secretariat, and that many of them were young women. What we showed to our counterpart and to the rest of the world is ‘Yes, it's normal and desirable to actually have women inside the room. It's not something that is against norms. In fact, it is the norm that building peace is a partnership.’ I think what we put forward is that we are building the partnership between the Filipino majority and the minority population who self-ascribe as Bangsamoro, but we are also building a partnership between men and women, ‘plus-plus’.

When you talk about distributing the ‘spoils’, or the ‘peace dividends’, most of the people appointed to senior positions were commanders, and they were all men. It is a balancing act for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. I think they’re aware they need to be gender responsive, but they are balancing so many interests. 

Some gender issues remain controversial. For example, the issue of child marriage. When it was criminalized by a national law, there was actually fierce resistance from some women who were very much part of the peacebuilding community, because these are now very key religious cultural practices that are being challenged, and that takes a lot of time to transform.”

Can you explain the work of the South-East Asian Women Peace Mediators?

“It’s not a network like the other regional women's networks, because we felt that we would be exerting our effort on running a network and pulling a lot of people together, instead of doing the work on-the-ground. So, there are just eight of us. Our formation was facilitated by the outgoing foreign minister of Indonesia, Retno Lestari Priansari Marsudi.  

We’re saying that if we want more women in mediation roles, not necessarily as state actors or as members of the official diplomatic community, then you should be there doing it, creating the spaces for dialogue, engaging the main stakeholders. We're showing that we women can come together, and that we are good at this kind of work. All of us have had tremendous experience in peacebuilding and mediation. In that sense, we're creating a niche as a group of women laying claim to important facilitating roles and generating solutions to ongoing conflicts.” 

What more needs to be done to leverage the Women, Peace and Security agenda to achieve more peaceful societies?

“We need to rebalance our focus. I think we went off-track with expectations about high-level peacebuilding processes and the participation of women therein. Participation is important, but participation where? If the platforms aren't there, you must find other platforms. You must create spaces and that means going back to the grassroots, to lower-level peacebuilding initiatives because the women live there. It's their life. It's their communities. 

We need to concentrate our energies on directly addressing peace and security issues, whether you're around the table or outside the door. We’re merging this gender agenda with the peace agenda, but sometimes we treat the gender agenda on its own and forget to find the real solutions to the peace questions. For example, what are women doing about the range of disarmament concerns that must be addressed? I think when you start bringing in all of this, it may seem something new, but it shouldn’t, because that's what women, peace and security is all about.” 

Prof Coronel Ferrer spoke with UN Women during the International Conference on Women, Peace and Security in Manila, October 2024.