Gender, violence and peace: a post-2015 development agenda

In this paper, Conciliation Resources and Saferworld set out a vision for including gender, violence and peace in the post-2015 framework. 

A gender, violence and peace approach to post-2015 includes but also goes beyond a focus on women’s empowerment. Inter alia, it means paying attention to the links between gender and violence and prioritising inclusive decision-making. 

Building on our previous recommendations for including peacebuilding commitments in the post-2015 development agenda, we suggest targets and indicators that illustrate how gender, violence and peace issues can best be integrated into the framework.

Things the post-2015 development framework should do:

• Be universal, aimed at advancing sustainable peace for all. People, not states, should be at its core.
• Integrate peacebuilding and violence prevention by including goals and targets, which address the most common drivers of conflict and violence.
• Include a standalone gender equality goal, which balances targets on ending abuses of women’s rights, targets supporting women’s agency and leadership and targets to tackle the underlying causes of gender inequality, including discriminatory attitudes and social norms.
• Include among these commitments targets and indicators to address gender issues which drive conflict, violence and exclusion. Inclusive decision-making should also be a key feature of the new framework.
• Utilise disaggregated data to help eliminate gender inequality and a range of other inequalities in every element of the new framework, and invest in data-gathering capacities to enable this.

Targets the post-2015 framework should include:

• All social groups can express political opinion without fear and participate in the decisions that affect society.
• Increase women’s political participation and influence on decision-making at all levels.
• All social groups are free from violence and insecurity.
• Violence against women and girls is eliminated.
• Broader targets to address key drivers of conflict and violence.

For more information on the report, please do not hesitate to contact our Policy Analyst Sanne Tielemans: stielemans@c-r.org

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More on Conciliation Resources' work on gender, peace and security:

• Read our Accord Insight: Women building peace, which looks back at the wealth of women's peacebuilding practice in our Accord series
• Read the workshop report of the event 'Gender, Peace and Security: Taking UNSCR1325 to the next level' 
• Find out more on how our East and Central Africa, Colombia, Philippines programmes work to ensure women's participation in peace processes.