Former U.S. Ambassador to Austria, Swanee Hunt, spoke with students and faculty yesterday about the evolving role of women in government decision making, particularly in those decisions involving conflict.
Hunt, who is currently the Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, was introduced by Associate Professor of Political Science Richard Eichenberg and Dean of the Tisch College Alan Solomont.
"Swanee Hunt's mission through life is to achieve gender parity, especially as a means to end war and rebuild societies, as well as to alleviate poverty and human suffering," Solomont, a former ambassador, explained.
Hunt, who spent her lecture dissecting the reasons why women may be better suited to resolve conflict, explained that she has pursued her research reason other than gender equality.
"I care a lot about women, but that isn't the most important driving force for me," she said. "I care a lot about poverty and people having hope in their lives and I come to those issues through the gender lens."
From 1993 to 1997, Hunt served as the ambassador to Austria, an important time for the Baltic States as Yugoslavia was in turmoil. She told the story of the Bosnian War, a conflict she worked to resolve through peace conferences in Vienna.
"I made probably 25 trips to Bosnia because Vienna was the last sane place before you dropped into hell," she explained. "You all are aware of what's happening in Syria ... Bosnia was the Syria of the time. It was a three-and-a-half year siege ... We had 40,000 refugees that streamed across the border into Vienna."
Working to reduce the conflict, Hunt sought to reduce the number of warring parties from three to two by bringing the Bosnians and Croats together. During the negotiations, she noticed a lack of women.
"I look around and I realized there were no women on any of the negotiating teams," she said. "There were no women and I didn't see it ahead of time. The reason I didn't see it was because I was looking through a lens that is called security."
A major problem with many negotiations is their temporary nature, according to Hunt. She explained that men often do not seek sustainable peace, something that women may be more inclined to discover.
Hunt showed clips of various women working to resolve conflicts around the world, including a woman in Northern Ireland, one in Rwanda and one in the Philippines. In many of the videos, the women were bringing additional resources to the negotiating table, starting from the grassroots and sought broader peace. She explained that in many of these cases, women, unlike men are likely to align themselves with one another.
"When women are involved in the negotiations, they actually advocate for other marginalized groups," Hunt said. "If you build up the number of women in both parties, the women will vote as a block."
In Rwanda, for instance, women's involvement in negotiations has seen a dramatic increase -- women now make up 75 percent of Parliament. While women were previously forbidden from speaking in public, they have been responsible for trying the people responsible for the recent genocide, and have had marked success, Hunt said.
"The large majority of the witnesses [of genocide] were women," she said. "Women were not to speak in a forum where men were present and here they were really taking hold of this process and what you found were how many people were actually acquitted.
Overall, Hunt expressed optimism and hopes the Rwandan example will be replicated. She said she sees an expanded role for women in future negotiations.
"What I love is seeing the same phenomenon over and over again and that's what it is about is women as they are able to secure the future of us all," she said. "This isn't women helping women, this isn't women helping girls. This is women carrying the future on their backs."
