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800 Leaders from 44 Nations Converge in South Korea to Prove Peace Starts with Female Leadership
CHEONGJU, South Korea — In hotel conference rooms where simultaneous translation crackled through headsets in eight languages, women who have stared down war, buried their dead, and refused to surrender to despair gathered with a singular, defiant message: We are the actors of peace.
The September 19th International Women's Peace Conference wasn't another diplomatic photo opportunity. It was a reckoning—800 participants from across continents, including government ministers from active conflict zones, coming together to dismantle the assumption that peace is something negotiated by men in suits while women wait in the wings.
From Conflict Zones to Conference Tables
The faces in the crowd at Cheongju's Enford Hotel told stories statistics cannot capture. Hon. Aisha Al-Mahdi Shalabi traveled from Libya's fractured political landscape. H.E. Bouaré Bintou Founé Samaké came from Mali, where transitional governments struggle against militant insurgencies. Dr. Faiza Abdulraqeb Sallam journeyed from Yemen—a nation the UN has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
These weren't academics theorizing about conflict. They were practitioners who understand that peacebuilding isn't abstract—it's the painstaking work of rebuilding trust one conversation at a time, of creating safety where terror once reigned, of imagining futures when the present offers only grief.
"Women are not mere victims or helpers of peace," Samaké declared during her keynote on women's leadership amidst crisis, "but key leaders to drive recovery and transition at the national level."
The statement landed with the weight of lived experience. In Mali, where violence has displaced hundreds of thousands, women have organized community protection networks, mediated between armed groups, and kept markets functioning when formal institutions collapsed.
The Leadership Gap Traditional Power Structures Ignore
The conference, hosted by the International Women's Peace Group (IWPG) under the theme "Beyond Conflict: Women's Peace Leadership toward Hope and Recovery," systematically dismantled a persistent myth: that women's contributions to peace are supplementary rather than central.
Dr. Amrita Kapur, Secretary General of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, traced how UN Security Council Resolution 1325 institutionalized women's roles in peace and security two decades ago—yet implementation remains frustratingly incomplete. While the international framework exists, women remain drastically underrepresented in formal peace negotiations, holding fewer than 13% of negotiator roles in recent processes.
Yet the conference presentations revealed what happens when women do lead. Hon. Maria Theresa Timbol from the Philippines shared how women transformed Mindanao—a region synonymous with conflict for generations—into what she described as "the cradle of peace." The transformation didn't come from military victory but from community-level reconciliation, economic development initiatives, and educational programs that gave young people alternatives to armed groups.
Peace Education: The Weapon Conflict Zones Need Most
The afternoon session pivoted to perhaps the conference's most innovative focus: Peace Leadership Training and Education (PLTE) as infrastructure for lasting stability.
H.E. Mrs. Nasseneba Touré Diané, Minister of Women, Family and Children of Côte d'Ivoire, detailed how her nation implemented IWPG's peace education framework at a national scale. Dr. Sallam emphasized that in Yemen—where schools have been bombed and a generation has grown up knowing only war—peace education isn't supplementary curriculum. It's existential necessity.
The most unexpected testimony came from Mongolia's military. Mrs. Lkhagvasuren Nyamtsetse, a Medical Supply Officer with the Mongolian Air Force Command, described providing peace education to 160 military personnel. The idea of soldiers learning peace principles might seem paradoxical, but Nyamtsetse's presentation suggested military forces trained in conflict resolution and human rights create more stable security environments than those taught only combat tactics.
This represents a radical reimagining of security itself—moving from deterrence models based on strength to prevention models based on understanding.
The Grassroots-to-Policy Pipeline
What distinguished this gathering from typical international conferences was its insistence on connecting individual action to systemic change. The Peace Family Workshop following the main sessions brought together 90 IWPG leaders—Peace Committee Representatives, Publicity Ambassadors, and branch managers from 44 countries—to develop concrete implementation strategies.
Workshop participants included Bold Batsuvd, president of Mongolia's Women's Federation, and Karen Elizabeth León Romero from Mexico's UNAM University Peace Committee. They worked in breakout groups, reviewing achievements and mapping action plans with the granularity that transforms conference declarations into community realities.
Ms. Ruth A. Richardson, Secretary General of the International Network of Liberal Women, connected women's peace leadership to broader global challenges—climate crisis response, water security, refugee protection. Her analysis suggested that female leadership doesn't just change who makes decisions but how decisions get made, favoring inclusive, long-term approaches over zero-sum competition.
The Korean Peninsula's Unfinished Story
For a conference held in South Korea, the peninsula's ongoing division provided both context and urgency. Ms. Lee Hae-ryoung, a North Korean defector now serving as IWPG Peace Committee Representative and Finance Director of the North Korean Defectors' Hope Club, addressed women's roles in peacebuilding for a divided nation.
Her presence embodied the conference's central premise—that those who have experienced division's human cost understand peace's requirements better than distant policymakers. The Korean peninsula remains technically at war seven decades after armistice, a reminder that even frozen conflicts require constant tending to prevent renewed eruption.
Institutionalizing Hope
Ms. Mampurane Caron Kgomo, Deputy Director of South Africa's Gender and Diversity Management Unit in the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, addressed the challenge of making peace permanent. Drawing on South Africa's own transition from apartheid—a process famously advanced by women activists—she advocated for institutionalizing women's participation through frameworks like the Declaration of Peace and Cessation of War (DPCW).
The DPCW, a ten-article, 38-clause document that IWPG has promoted internationally, attempts to create binding international law around conflict prevention and resolution. While not yet adopted by the UN, it represents efforts to give peace the same legal architecture that governs trade, intellectual property, and maritime boundaries.
Cultural Diplomacy in the Margins
Beyond formal sessions, the conference organizers understood that peace culture develops through connection as much as policy. Side activities included the judging of the 7th International Loving-Peace Art Competition, featuring artists from Czech Republic, India, and Korea. A Peace Culture Lounge offered foreign guests experiences with traditional Korean culture—creating color salt art, learning Hangeul calligraphy—the small human exchanges that build understanding beneath political disagreements.
These weren't frivolous additions but acknowledgment that sustainable peace requires cultural foundation, not just legal framework. When people have shared experiences—even something as simple as struggling together to write unfamiliar characters—they're less likely to reduce each other to stereotypes when disagreement arises.
"This Moment Will Be a Meaningful Platform"
IWPG Chairwoman Na Yeong Jeon opened the conference with words that rejected both pessimism and empty optimism: "This event brings together women worldwide who have not stopped working and uniting for peace despite conflict and war. This moment will be a meaningful platform to discuss concrete action items for sustainable peace."
Meaningful platform—not "solution" or "breakthrough," but space for the difficult, ongoing work peace requires. Concrete action items—not aspirational declarations but specific, implementable steps.
The realism was striking. These women weren't promising to end war. They were committing to the less glamorous, infinitely harder work of building alternatives to violence, one community, one curriculum, one conversation at a time.
The Numbers Behind the Movement
IWPG operates with impressive reach—115 branches across 122 countries, 808 partner organizations in 68 nations, and formal status with both UN ECOSOC and UN DGC. This infrastructure enables coordination across regions and rapid mobilization when opportunities arise.
But numbers don't capture the qualitative difference of women-led peace efforts. Research consistently shows that when women participate in peace processes, agreements are more likely to last. When women are involved in post-conflict reconstruction, communities rebuild faster and more equitably. The evidence base isn't anecdotal—it's overwhelming.
Yet women remain systematically excluded from formal peace processes, their contributions relegated to "civil society" while men occupy "political" spaces, as if building community cohesion were somehow less political than signing documents.
What Happens Next
The real test of any conference comes in the months following, when inspiration confronts implementation obstacles and action plans meet resource constraints. The participants departing Cheongju scattered back to Mali, Yemen, Libya, Philippines, Mongolia, South Africa, Belize, and dozens of other nations, carrying commitments made in hotel conference rooms back to communities where daily survival often eclipses long-term planning.
But perhaps that's precisely why this gathering mattered. Because the women who attended aren't waiting for conflicts to end before building peace. They're doing it in the midst of war—teaching children to resolve disputes without violence while bombs fall nearby, mediating between armed groups while militias patrol streets, creating economic opportunities for women while patriarchal structures resist change.
They understand something that eludes many traditional peacemakers: Peace isn't a destination you reach after conflict ends. It's infrastructure you build while conflict continues, creating alternatives so compelling that eventually, war becomes unnecessary.
As Dr. Sallam from Yemen might put it—you don't wait until the house stops burning to start drawing blueprints for what comes next. You build firebreaks, organize bucket brigades, and plan reconstruction while flames still rage, because hope deferred is hope destroyed.
The 800 women who gathered in Cheongju chose differently. They chose to be architects of peace in an era of war, understanding that every school curriculum teaching conflict resolution, every community mediation preventing violence, every woman entering leadership represents not just incremental progress but categorical transformation of what peace itself means.
"We are the actors of peace," they declared—not in the future tense, but in the eternal present where actual change happens.
And in a world exhausted by endless conflict, that insistence on agency, on women's centrality rather than peripherality to peace, might be the most radical message of all.
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Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
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