Mainstreaming Gender Into Conflict And Peace Building Through Women Led Madras’s In Pakistan

Armed conflict has many significant effects on gender relations. Women and girls have special vulnerabilities to many forms of violence. Women bear many consequences of wars and suffer violations of human rights in situations of armed conflict including terrorism, rape, disappearance, ethnic cleansing, family separation, displacement, and social and psychological traumas. Peace building is generally defined as initiatives that are designed to prevent the eruption or return of armed conflict. As argued in this initiative, and as increasingly recognized in scholarship and diplomacy, religion can be used or mobilized to promote either conflict or peace building. There are strong connections among women and peace building processes. United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1325 (SCR, 1325), recognized that armed conflict affects women in different ways and women plays an important role in conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and peace building processes. Mostly, women’s engagement in religious peacemaking is often invisible because, in many contemporary conflict zones and faith traditions, men tend to dominate formal religious leadership. Historical tendencies of male domination in security matters - and violent conflict specifically – accentuate women’s invisibility. And it is evident that women are crucial in conflict situations, because women’s perspectives, needs and unique leverage are often ignored by policy makers and scholars in the design of traditional religious peacemaking initiatives. This suggests new ways of understanding peace processes and making them more effective. This paper focuses on mainstreaming a gender approach to peace building, emphasizing the interests and needs of women and girls in post-conflict situations. The paper presents a bottom-up approach to religious peace building, exploring how institutes led by women, home based madrassas, can play a crucial role in rebuilding peace in conflict zones of Pakistan. Madrassas in Pakistan are schools in which religious knowledge is the focus. In the madrassas, Quranic study and methods of prayers are taught to young children (including boys and girls) by female religious leaders (often called as Bibi’s), in both war-affected and stable settings. This paper also presents case studies of two women-driven madrassas, each of which offers an opportunity to reflect on the intersection of women, religion, conflict and peace in both war-affected and stable settings. In these examples, women hold regular sessions on religious matters and teach children religious knowled