Reflection of Voices on Women and Peace; An Attempt to Present the Narratives of Afghan Women
Since the beginning of the peace process in the country, one of the main concerns has been the uncertainty of the status of women's rights in this process. The Civil Society and Human Rights Network has sought to create a fairly comprehensive account of the country's women in a program entitled "Women and Peace: Between Hope and Fear," which includes 100 interviews and 365 messages from citizens across the country. Sayed Hussain Anosh, executive director of the Civil Society and Human Rights Network, said that their motivation for designing such a program was to achieve the best possible way to build a comprehensive narrative of Afghan women. "With the start of the peace talks, the question that came to our mind was how to create a narrative for the meaningful presence of women in the peace process. Nowadays, women do not usually write to reflect on their narratives. Nevertheless, this initiative brought them together to express their demands, and concerns on the peace talks through writing, and speeches” Anosh said. CSHRN: What is the purpose of the Women and Peace initiative? Anosh: The idea was to highlight the voices of Afghan women on the Afghan peace process. We attempted to strengthen the culture of dialogue to move forward to producing content, text, and narratives. Therefore, I view 100 interviews and 365 peace messages gathered and reached out widely to the public helped raise public awareness on the important role of women and strengthened their position in peace and conflict prevention. CSHRN: How was effective the program? Anosh: During the project, we were receiving hundreds of messages every day, people were expressing their interest to send us their messages and voices for circulation through CSHRN’s social media platforms. Due to a high number of messages, we could not respond…