Women, War & Peace

Pictured: Leymah Gbowee, featured Liberian activist

Credit: Courtesy of Michael Angelo for Wonderland

Women, War & Peace focuses on the under-reported stories of the women who are changing the rules of engagement in conflict hotspots all over the world.

What if you looked at war as though women mattered? What if you looked at peace as though women mattered? These two questions are at the heart of a five-hour series, Women, War & Peace, a comprehensive global media initiative on the changing roles of women in war and peace. Actors Matt Damon, Geena Davis, Tilda Swinton, and Alfre Woodard narrate.

Filmed in conflict zones in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia, and Liberia, Women, War & Peace, airing Monday, March 10 through Friday, March 14, 2014 at 7 p.m. on WXXI World, couldn’t be timelier. With the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Women, War & Peace places women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security.

Episode titles, descriptions, and air dates on WXXI World:
                   
I Came to Testify, airing March 10 at 7 p.m, is the moving story of how a group of 16 women who had been imprisoned and raped by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history’s great silence and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law. Their remarkable courage resulted in a triumphant verdict that led to new international laws about sexual violence in war. Matt Damon, who narrates the film, has taped a behind-the-scenes-video talking about why the themes of this series matter to men, too.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell, airing March 11 at 8 p.m, is the astonishing story of the Liberian women who took on the warlords and regime of dictator Charles Taylor in the midst of a brutal civil war and won a once unimaginable peace for their shattered country in 2003. Among the women featured is Leymah Gbowee, the leader of the Liberian women’s peace movement. Gbowee is based in Accra, Ghana, where she is executive director of the Women Peace and Security Network – Africa. Her book, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War, with Carol Mithers will be published in September 2011 by Beast Books.

Peace Unveiled airs March 12 at 7 p.m. When the U.S. troop surge was announced in late 2009, women in Afghanistan knew that the ground was being laid for peace talks with the Taliban. Peace Unveiled follows three women in Afghanistan who are risking their lives to make sure that women have a seat at the negotiating table. Tilda Swinton narrates.

The War We Are Living, airing March 13 at 8 p.m., travels to Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia’s Pacific southwest, where two extraordinary Afro-Colombian women are fighting to stay on their gold-rich lands. They are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war.Alfre Woodard narrates.

War Redefined, airing March 14 at 7 p.m., the capstone of Women, War & Peace, challenges the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain through incisive interviews with leading thinkers, secretaries of state, and seasoned survivors of war and peacemaking. Interviewees include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and both her female predecessors, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice; Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee; Bosnian war crimes investigator Fadila Memisevic; and globalization expert Moises Naim. Geena Davis narrates.