The D.C. Student Consortium on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) is a student-led organization under the leadership of Dr. Shirley Graham, Director of the GW Gender Equality in International Affairs initiative (GEIA), that aims to — in collaboration with the U.S. Civil Society Working Group on WPS (U.S. CSWG) — promote awareness and education about the importance of integrating analysis of women and gender into security and foreign policy.
Madeline Elliott, a second year Elliott School graduate student pursuing a degree in international affairs with a concentration in global gender policy, and one of the group’s founding members, says the impetus for the group’s formation was Dr. Graham’s desire to include multi-generational perspectives in the work of the U.S. CSWG.
In collaboration with CSWG and 18 universities in the D.C. area, the consortium aims to encourage intergenerational thinking between academia and practitioners about the WPS agenda and the gender/security nexus, as well as connect students in the D.C. area working on WPS issues. The CSWG has fully endorsed having the consortium serve as its “mini think tank,” essentially performing innovative research and producing policy briefs for organizations in the Working Group as a means of educating policymakers and promoting awareness of WPS issues.
In honor of International Women’s Day, the group is hosting a day-long conference on March 9, featuring addresses by Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini, Founder and Executive Director of ICAN, as well as Dr. Kathleen Kuehnast, Director of Gender Policy and Strategy at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP). The conference also includes workshops on key issues related to the WPS agenda, with experts in each policy topic featured as speakers and representatives from the consortium serving as facilitators. The conversations from these workshops will be foundational for future research conducted by consortium members. Concluding remarks will be given by Ambassador Melanne Verveer, Executive Director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and first U.S. Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, as well as Dr. Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, President of Women in International Security (WIIS). Elliott School alumna, Jenna Ben-Yehuda, B.A. ’02, founder of the Women’s Foreign Policy Network, and the President and CEO of the Truman Center for National Policy, will also be a panelist.
For more information about the consortium and the March 9 conference, visit their website.