On Thursday 25 October, Griffith Asia Institute’s Human Protection Hub held a workshop on Women, Peace and Security (WPS): opportunities for alignment with Responsibility to Protect (R2P). With the assistance of colleagues from the 
Asia Pacific Centre for Responsibility to Protect (University of Queensland) and the Centre of Governance and Public Policy (Griffith University), this event was among the first of its kind in policy and academic circles. The program for this event may be accessed at: Responsibility to Protect: Alignment with Women, Peace and Security. A blog summarising the discussion of the workshop can be found at HPH blog Protection Gateway . Publication of papers from the Workshop will be forthcoming with Martinus Nijhoff in edited book titled, The Responsibility to Protect: A Principle for the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, forthcoming 2013.
We were honoured to host distinguished guests including Michael Bliss, Assistant Secretary of International Organizations branch at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, with colleagues from the Human Rights and International Law branches; Rosemary Cassidy, Senior Specialist in the Gender Equality Policy Section of AusAID and colleagues from the Humanitarian Policy Section; Assistant Commissioner Mandy Newton, National Manager of the Australian Federal Police’s International Deployment Group; Mairi Steele, Branch Manager of the Women’s Branch in the Australian Government Office for Women, which is housed in the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, and her colleagues; and Julie McKay, Executive Director of UN Women Australia. Discussants and presenters also came from Oxfam Australia, the Australian Civil-Military Centre, Office of National Assessments, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Australia, Australian National University, University of NSW, University of Queensland and Monash University.
The dialogue focused on three central themes:
1) What states should do to realise the goals set out in UN Security Council Resolution 1325.
2) The advantages and disadvantages associated with the alignment of R2P with WPS in the fields of international policing and peacekeeping, conflict resolution, peacebuilding and transitional justice.
3) The extent to which the structural prevention ambitions of WPS can be assisted by association with early warning and assessment mechanisms relating to genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
For further details contact Sara Davies ([email protected])
