Students focused on Women, Peace and Security issues
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The meaningful participation of youth, especially students, in the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda creates completely new perspectives. To this end, UN Women supports higher education institutions in integrating WPS topics into the curricula of relevant academic programmes.
Namely, UN Women partners with the Journalism Resource Center to promote student research interest in the WPS field, as well as to develop gender-sensitive conflict analysis, underlining women’s role in peacebuilding and their meaningful participation. Within the framework of this cooperation, one of the panels of the 81st Student Scientific Conference at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University was dedicated to research papers on WPS.
In total, 19 papers were presented at the conference. One of them discussed the mechanisms of women’s economic empowerment in Georgia from 2010 to 2020. Among the participants and winners of the conference, Irma Chkheidze and Sopho Narimanidze, MA students of Public Administration and Public Policy Programme, noted that their interest in these issues inspired their academic research: “We wanted to study the challenges that women face in the post-conflict transition period and to see from their perspective and analyze what kind of policy the State has in this direction. In the process of doing research, along with the analysis of state policy, the large-scale role and influence of local civil society organizations and international actors in the development of local policy, as well as in the formation of institutional design and the legislative framework, were clearly identified.”
Another winner of the WPS panel, sociologist Lela Javakhishvili, has studied the practice of femicide coverage in Georgian TV, noting: “Progress is obvious compared to previous years, and this requires more attention.”
In the future, the successful papers will also be published. The conference was organized within the framework of the UN Women project “Accelerating Implementation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Georgia”, generously funded by the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund of the British Government.