How to bring the people into a Cyprus peace process, 18 May 2023
Part of the Sapienta Cyprus Reflections series
Welcome to Sapienta Cyprus Reflections, a sub-category of Sapienta Cyprus Snippets. It is free for now. You can read more about each series here.
In preparation for an event organized on 16 May by the British High Commission and Irish Embassy about women’s contribution to the Northern Ireland Good Friday/Belfast Agreement despite significant challenges, I took a look at all of the mentions of women in United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNCSR) on Cyprus. It threw up a number of thoughts and ideas, which I am sharing here for anyone involved in trying to help put this lovely island back together again.
First, I shall discuss how the role of women in the Cyprus negotiations has developed. Then, given that talk of a new process is in the air, I shall use that to draw lessons for the broader design of any future negotiations process.
Broader engagement brings more sustainable peace
Thanks to research into more than 200 other conflicts including Northern Ireland, it has long been recognized that fully engaging women in a peace process makes a peace agreement more likely and makes it more sustainable. It is not rocket science: bringing in broader perspectives (and not only women) can also help find new ways of looking at old problems.
Mentions of women in UNSCRs on Cyprus grew from nothing at all between 1964 and 2010, to one paragraph in December 2011, two paragraphs in 2018 and finally to six paragraphs and 19 mentions in July 2022. I remember from my UN work that the 2011 mention was pushed by Elizabeth Spehar, as Director of the Europe Division of the Department of Political Affairs in New York. Mentions accelerated when Ms Spehar served as Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) in Cyprus in 2016-2021.
Three aspects to the latest UN Security Council resolution
The latest resolution has lots of details about what is expected of the leaders to ensure the “full, equal and meaningful participation and leadership of women” in building peace in Cyprus; to “bring together a broader range of women actors on both sides”; and to “ensure the needs and perspectives of women are addressed in a future settlement”. It also bolsters the mandate of the Technical Committee on Gender Equality to take forward the Action Plan which it produced in December 2021. You can find the Action Plan here.
There are thus three aspects to the latest resolution. They are succinctly described by the three questions addressed by the Action Plan. The three questions are as follows (emphasis added).
How to ensure women’s full and meaningful representation in the settlement process/an eventual settlement process?
How to engage with civil society, including women’s organisations, to solicit their views in an eventual settlement process/the settlement process?
How to include a gender perspective in the settlement process/an eventual settlement process?
So you need 1) women properly at the negotiations; 2) you need to incorporate the views of women beyond the negotiating table; and 3) you need to think carefully about the differential impact of laws and policies on men and women, boys and girls. (Incidentally, you could go even further and aim for the best-in-class gender-transformative approach, as Sophia Papastavrou and I describe here.)
1. More women at the table
Cypriot women (and UN women) have been physically present at the Cyprus negotiating table for a long time. Two women who held senior positions in the most recent round of talks, Polly Ioannou and Sülen Karabacak Mehrübeoğlu, spoke about their experiences at an event hosted by the Technical Committee on 9 May.
What is missing is to make women at the table more visible and to make this the norm rather than accidental. For that reason, the latest resolutions call for “the inclusion of at least 30 per cent women in future delegations”, while the Action Plan, more inclusively, calls for “no more than two thirds of any gender”.
2. Meaningful engagement of women beyond the table
Efforts to engage women outside of the formal political process first began in 2009 with the formation with UN support of the Gender Advisory Team (GAT), comprising civil society activists and scholars from both sides of the divide. GAT produced policy recommendations and a report but since it was not part of the formal process, my impression is that they did not get much traction with the political leadership at that time.
Things began to change with the formation of the Technical Committee on Gender Equality in 2015 (a report on its early years by Olga Demetriou can be found here), the insistence in January 2020 of Resolution 2506 that the Technical Committee should meet again and prepare an action plan, and the most recent insistence in Resolution 2646 that both sides to support the “thorough and effective implementation of all recommendations under the Action Plan”. The leaders also have six-monthly reporting requirements.
I believe we are now moving towards a scenario in which it is the Technical Committee that engages directly with women in civil society and “women beyond politics”, so to speak, and then feeds its findings back into the leaders via the regular reports demanded by the Security Council.
3. Gender perspective: writing it into a future agreement
The last item is going to be the toughest. The documentary that was shown on Tuesday showed that, at the eleventh hour, despite women in Northern Ireland winning a popular vote to be fully engaged in the process, they were absent from the first drafts of the Good Friday Agreement.
This is why the third point of the Action Plan includes, “separate to the requirement of no more than two-thirds of any gender, a Gender Expert in order to ensure that a gender perspective is fully integrated at all levels”. It also recognizes the considerable resources required to implement the Action Plan. Garnering the views of women in all socioeconomic situations will need a lot of money and human resources.
What lessons for a future negotiating process?
As I have argued a few times on Twitter, a negotiations process is structurally flawed if it depends too much on two leaders who are afraid to make decisions because they have elections coming. Ireland has made extensive use of “deliberative democracy” via Citizens’ Assemblies – a process of informed public engagement with a representative cross-section of society who tackle difficult and highly sensitive constitutional questions. The full engagement of ordinary people in this way helps takes the heat off politicians by helping them see what is broadly acceptable.
I honestly think it is the only way forward for Cyprus. But given how long it took to get anywhere close to meaningful engagement for women in Cyprus, how do we get there?
Lesson 1: leaders don’t move without a Security Council resolution. The first lesson is that nothing new or progressive in the Cyprus negotiations process happens without a resolution from the Security Council. Often this has been done in an artful way. For example, if the leaders really really don’t want to do that request on military engagement, they will have to do that other thing the Security Council asked for instead. And as diplomat readers of this article will know, you can’t just dump something new into a resolution from on high. It takes a lot of legwork and persuasion. There is something to work with in paragraph 5(e) of the latest resolution. But if we want a fully mandated participatory process that has a greater chance of success than the failed negotiation models of the past, the work on that must start now.
Lesson 2: personal commitment matters. The second lesson is the importance of personal commitment. I noted the critical contribution of Ms Spehar above. Among Cypriots, some of the members of the Technical Committee (and GAT before that) have been at this, mostly unpaid, for decades. The same is true of the broader peace movement in Cyprus. A new Cyprus negotiations process needs to find ways of financially supporting human beings (not just food or travel or venues), not least because it can help old-timers nurture a new generation.
Lesson 3: members in the Security Council matter. The final lesson is for peace activists. I know because of conversations at the time that the “big bazooka” resolution on women of July 2018 came with the strong support of Sweden, which happened to have a rotating seat on the UN Security Council at the time. Keep an eye on who is on the Council in any given year so that you know whom to lobby.