Women, Peace and Security Champion Profile: Kumudini Samuel
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Individuals and organizations who are championing the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Asia and the Pacific are being profiled by UN Women – online and in our 2025 calendar – to mark this agenda’s 25th anniversary.
Kumudini Samuel co-founded the Women and Media Collective in Sri Lanka in 1984, and has been a leading force behind the organization’s contribution to the inclusion of women and gender concerns in the nation’s peace process and increased state recognition of women’s rights. She is also an executive committee member of the global South feminist network, DAWN - Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era.
Reflecting on 25 years of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, what does this anniversary mean to you?
We live in a world beset by multiple, intersecting crises and a multilateral system that is severely challenged and losing credibility. We need to look critically at the achievements of the WPS agenda globally, but also take stock of its limitations and shortcomings.
We need to revisit the vision of the feminists who helped conceptualise the idea of women, peace and security 25 years ago. The WPS agenda they envisioned was not about the mitigation of war, but about its prevention and an end to war. Our work on WPS must get back in touch with the realities of today.
What have been the most significant gains and persistent gaps in advancing women’s participation in peace and security processes in Sri Lanka?
In Sri Lanka, we live in a post-war context in that we are free from years of protracted war, yet we are not ‘post-conflict’ and bear the burden of the consequences of long years of war. We must therefore address both the causes of conflict and the consequences of war.
Since the war was ended militarily, we did not have the benefit of a negotiated political solution – a long-standing demand of the war years. Consequently, a persistent gap is the need to engage in a process of inclusive conflict resolution. As critical is the need for accountability, truth and justice for war crimes. We have had extensive consultations on both constitutional reform and transitional justice mechanisms. Women’s voice and engagement were central in these processes.
With a new government in power, we now have the opportunity to address the root causes of conflict as well as redress the consequences of war. This includes reforming our Constitution to address the entrenched discrimination against minority communities as well as instituting independent mechanisms that can enable truth and justice and ensure accountability. In a post-war context marked by an ongoing economic and debt crisis with a new government committed to systemic change, we need to envision political transition together with social and economic transition that includes economic redistribution and justice. We need to deliver on transitional justice. The right to truth is central to post-war justice as is accountability that ends entrenched impunity, and women are essential for this transition.
What are your hopes for the future in terms of achieving full and equal representation of women at all levels of peacebuilding, conflict prevention and security in Sri Lanka?
The end of the war in Sri Lanka did not bring about the end to ethnic conflict in the country. The war ended militarily with no politically negotiated solution to the conflict or the benefit of a ‘peace process’. However, the main proponents of transitional justice have been women; women who have been seeking justice for those who disappeared from the early 1980s, and particularly those who disappeared at the end of the war in 2009. Sri Lanka has the second-highest rate of disappearances in the world.
We must remember that women are not victims. In Sri Lanka, women have been both the face and spirit of resistance, and they continue to resist injustice. They have resisted in myriad ways – often putting their bodies and lives on the line – but also creatively with the hope and passion of life. They continue to be the seekers of truth and justice. They refuse to be silenced. Yet, there is no formal process that these women are represented in, nor are they formally recognized. But they have engaged consistently in consultative processes for constitutional reform and made extensive recommendations to the Consultative Task Force for Reconciliation Mechanisms.
By their sheer courage, they have continued to defend their right and freedom to hold public memorials for loved ones and to engage in peaceful protests without intimidation and surveillance. Work on WPS must recognize and include these spaces of struggle and engagement with conflict resolution and transitional justice. They are a fundamental part of peace making.
What role can women leaders in Asia and the Pacific play in shaping the WPS agenda?
Women leaders have to shape the future of the region in the context of militarization of the oceans, in the furtherance of geo-political economic and political interests, violations of human rights and democratic norms, and other complex issues. They have to re-envision the WPS agenda to address the root causes of conflict, in particular the structural causes of conflict embedded in an economic order that has widened inequalities between and within states. Peace processes must emphatically address issues of justice, both political and economic if they are to move to transitions that are just and realise long term, sustainable peace.
My message is don’t be afraid to change the narrative. Peace building, peacemaking and conflict resolution must address people’s needs, especially the women most affected. Be attuned to diversity, embrace and respect differences, uphold plurality and tolerance, and never shy away from dissent or resistance. Listen to the voices of history. Listen to the voices of resistance and build a just, peaceful and sustainable future. Therein lie the solutions.
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The UN Women 2025 anniversary desktop calendar for Asia and the Pacific was produced with the support of the Australian Government to mark 25 years of the WPS agenda in the region.
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