Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP)

ROUNDTABLES

A significant milestone in WISCOMP’s effort towards engendering security is the South Asian collaborative research project titled Transcending Conflict: Gender and Non Traditional Security. This initiative facilitateS research, published as monographs, by scholars from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and India on areas of conflict within the country of their residence. It has significantly contributed to the growing literature on non-traditional security approaches. The WISCOMP program is essentially an exploration of the relationship between gender and security and the research process has involved commissioning a series of monographs across South Asia that are both stand alone studies and also part of a series on engendering security.

The WISCOMP Roundtable series on Engendering Security has been conceptualized to generate informed discussions around some of the seminal ideas emerging from the South Asian research and writing project on Gender and Non-traditional Formulations of Security.

The roundtables are seen as a crucial component of the project design that aims among other things, to provide that crucial interface between researchers, reviewers, activists, and practitioners so that a synergy is built between research and practice. The roundtable discussions intend to:

Provide a context for subject specialists to provide critical feedback to the core research team on work in progress so that this informs subsequent revisions of the manuscripts.

Provide a context for younger scholars to engage with a team of senior and mid career scholars working in the emerging field of non-traditional security formulations so that they are introduced to the new terms of discourse and alternative ways of thinking about security.

Provide inputs to policy makers so that non-traditional security approaches do not remain confined to the academia but also helps shape the thinking of policy makers.

Keeping in mind these multiple goals, WISCOMP tries to ensure that the discussions are typically attended by a representative group of researchers, practitioners, policy makers and reviewers. The idea is to engage people from diverse backgrounds, different ways of thinking about security, and various political and ideological persuasions in dialogue. The richness and diversity of views that are tabled in the process is expected to form the crucial alphabets that will fashion an alternative discourse on security – one that interrogates the apparent contradictions between the so-called “traditional” and non-traditional and seeks instead to map the intersections between the two.