Interview: "We need a global movement for peace and disarmament and active women should take the lead"
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Sonja Lokar, 77, is a distinguished Professor of French Language and Sociology, former politician, and international civil society activist from Slovenia. A passionate advocate for peace and women’s rights, she served in both the former socialist and the first multi-party parliaments and organized regional initiatives like the CEE Network for Gender Issues. Now an international gender equality expert collaborating with UN agencies, the Council of Europe, and others, Sonja continues to champion women’s political empowerment and leads the Women’s Lobby of Slovenia, with over 300 articles and several handbooks to her name.
1. You’ve pioneered gender equality and peacebuilding in Europe and beyond. What inspired you to dedicate your life to this cause?
I did not have a choice. In our part of the world, in the last 150 years, every generation has had its war. I understood that we, women are the essential actors who could stop this terrible tradition.
2. How has the landscape for women in peace and security changed since you first started your activism?
I was born in the socialist federation of Yugoslavia, a country rising from a magnificent liberation movement in WWII, where women organized in the Antifascist Women’s Front. This massive organization made them an essential part and parcel of the liberation and the post-war recovery period, the pillar of the emancipation of women in Yugoslavia after the WWII. We lived in the shadow of a looming third world war and even worse a global nuclear war. To prevent this, socially and politically active women from my country were actively involved in peace politics of the nonalignment movement, and in the UN gender equality politics, like the UN Decade of Women under the slogan Equality, Development, and Peace. The alternative to the global conflict was Tito’s “active peaceful coexistence” of all sovereign nations and the liberation of the third-world countries from colonial oppression. A new, independent feminist movement was started in the eighties, becoming a part of this process, protesting the attempts of additional investments in the armament and militarization of the society. Unfortunately, it was far from the unity, massiveness, and social impact of the Antifascist Women’s Front. Its calls for a peaceful solution of the Yugoslav crises and equal political participation of women failed. After the first free elections in 1990, in all republics of Yugoslavia, women’s representation in the parliaments and governments was down from 25% in 1986 to 2, 3, maximum 11%. The decisions to start wars for the redrafting of the borders of the future new, nation-states, coming out from the dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation, were taken without women. The attempts of active women to prevent these wars protesting in the streets, failed. In the series of armed conflicts, from 1991 till 1999 millions of people were displaced and made refugees or IDPs, hundreds of thousands were killed, many, nobody knows how many, women were raped to fasten ethnic cleansing, they were made homeless, jobless, widowed, and lost their children. All that the defeated women’s peace movement could do in these wars was to transform itself into the support of women victims of war violence. And they did this also by helping, in the women’s NGO Huaro gathering, and at the governmental part of the UN Beijing conference, in defining rape in war as an international crime against humanity.
3. Can you share a defining moment when you saw firsthand the impact of including women in peace processes? What strategies have proven most effective in increasing women's leadership in peacebuilding?
For the active women from former socialist Yugoslavia, this was a moment of establishment of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe in the summer of 1999. This was a great intergovernmental plan, similar to the Marshall plan after WWII for Western Europe, to rebuild the Balkans after the wars, supporting its economic, social, and political recovery and democratic normalization. At this moment, in June 1999, mainstream international politics did not even think about women as essential agents of reconciliation and post-war recovery. But the active women from Bosnia and Herzegovina knew better. Before the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was even accepted, they succeeded in finding out how to bring women's agency, needs, and requests formally to the three tables of the Stability Pact. At this moment I was working from Budapest as executive director of the CEE Network for Gender Issues, a network of social democratic women, established in 1994, and connecting feminists in 28 mostly former socialist countries. This network worked in close cooperation with 150 NGOs and politically active women within the center and left political parties and women in the parliaments and governments, women activists from feminist NGOIs, academia, trade unions, and media in the states born from the former Yugoslavia, but also active women from its neighboring countries. It all started with an Appeal, initiated from the women from Bosnia and Herzegovina, that I coordinated and sent to the leadership of the Stability Pact. In a week, we gathered more than 180 signatures from all over the Balkans and from CE Europe. This Appeal was our Resolution 1325, stating that we were fed up with being victims of the aggressive male-only politics and that we asked for an equal formal place at the tables of the Stability Pact. With the generous support of the OSCE Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we got the attention of the leader of the Stability Pact and his promise that women would be included. It took us a lot of effort and lobbying first to establish the so-called Stability Pact Gender Task Force, the first gender equality mechanism in an intergovernmental regional peace-building initiative ever, and to set it up in the way that active women from the Balkans thought it should be done. This Gender Task Force was operating for ten years, and its main legacy was the crucial political empowerment of women in all 7 countries of the post - war Balkans. From an average below 7% in 2000 the share of women MPs grew to an average of 27% in 2009, and in all these countries, active women succeeded in enacting efficient legal quotas and setting up gender equality machineries and solid frameworks of modern gender equality legislation. The biggest achievement of the Gender Task Force was that its work proved to give sustainable results even when the Task Force was closed in 2009. Based on its work, women activists from all parties and walks of life, in 2011, put together a complete action plan for the sustainable, gender-sensitive development of Serbia.
4. What do you consider to be the biggest unfinished business of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda?
The global agenda of indivisible universal human rights for all is under attack from everywhere. In such situations, gender equality risks slipping into the position of a non-issue, again. Today we need to understand that the Women's Peace and Security Agenda was never the blueprint only for active women in places directly threatened or even already sucked in wars. Today this is a priority agenda for all active women around the globe. I think that we have to build a much stronger awareness of the necessity to shift our focus to the prevention of wars, to stop the wars, to the healing of war traumas, to social equality, human security everywhere, to organize pressure on the elected leaders to talk instead of fight, and us, to build firm broad national, regional and global coalitions for disarmament and just green transition. We badly need a global movement for peace and disarmament and active women should take the lead.
5. How can 25-year-old youth drive progress and innovation in the regional peace agenda as we commemorate its 25th anniversary of WPS?
I am 77 years old. I feel that I have no right to answer this question – even less so, when we already have the youth fighting in incredibly imaginative and fearless ways for a better, less violent, less dangerous, more compassionate, and equal world. Just have a look at the campaign for free-of-charge access to abortion for all who need it in the EU, “My voice, my choice”, a million and 120 000 signatures collected for this citizens’ initiative in the EU in less than 10 months. Take a look at the three months of peaceful student protests in Serbia demanding accountability from elected officials. The movement calls for the establishment of credible, professional institutions that operate within their mandate and end of corruption - at the heart of these protests is a strong demand for the rule of law and the protection of democratic principles. The predominantly youth-led movement has prompted the government of Slovenia to reconsider its stance on recognizing the Palestinian state, in response to the Israeli politics of apartheid, relentless appropriation of the Palestinians’ land, and genocidal retaliation to the Hamas’ unacceptable attack on Israeli civilians on October 7.
All I can suggest is, to cooperate, to coordinate, to work together against any form of violence and war, across all our differences, across all generations and men-women divide.
This story is published as part of "The Past, Present, and Future of Women, Peace, and Security" campaign, commemorating the 25th anniversary of UNSCR 1325, to celebrate the power of peace. The campaign aims to foster a deeper dialogue on equality, justice and peace, honoring the legacies and amplifying the voices of 25 trailblazing women from across Europe and Central Asia whose significant contributions have transformed their communities, societies, and beyond. The content reflects the personal views and experiences of the author(s) and does not necessarily represent the official position of UN Women, its partners, or the United Nations.