The Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership (WASL) brings together existing women rights and peace practitioners, organizations, and networks actively engaged in preventing extremism and promoting peace, rights and pluralism, to enable their systematic and strategic collaboration.
‘Wasl’ means to ‘connect’ in Arabic, Urdu and Persian.
“Women’s rights activists are the longest-standing socially-rooted, transnational groups mobilizing for peace, countering rising extremism, and providing an alternative vision for the future.” — WASL founding statement
Our Approach
We cultivate vertical, horizontal and diagonal connections
Vertical Connections
- Facilitate access for national and grassroots women-led organizations to engage substantively in the international countering violent extremism (CVE) debate by collating their perspectives on critical issues (e.g. security, economics, education) and publishing policy papers. This includes information sharing and analyses from the ground to increase knowledge of the gender dimensions of violent extremism with a focus on solutions to root causes and contributions to preventative action.
- Link women’s networks, practitioners, and organizations more effectively to governmental processes, enabling them to share lessons learned and shape state and multilateral policies and programs based on ground realities and needs.
- Develop shared, conceptually-sound solutions to challenges the security-oriented approaches and narratives of existing CVE policies and programs.
- Avoid duplication of efforts and provide a means of coordination and mutual development and support based on a division of labor and core strengths among INGOs, government, and multilateral organizations.
Horizontal Connections
- Provide opportunities to enable the sharing of strategies and lessons learned across countries between grassroots, national civil society actors, and regional and international activists/organizations facing similar manifestations of extremism, including “know-how” and good practices for scaling up successful and promising initiatives.
- Ensure allocation of resources to support innovative solutions locally and internationally in a range of spheres — notably practical community-based work, messaging and communications, production of knowledge, etc.
- Connect existing women-led organizations and resource persons working on extremism and promoting peace to deepen solidarity and strengthen their impact.
- Initiate country-focused public surveys and other efforts to tap into the aspirations of potentially vulnerable populations and use that data to articulate a coherent and realistic alternative vision with attention to improvements in education, justice, economic, and other human security policies.
Diagonal Connections
- Include and reach out to other sectors – notably arts and culture, journalism, religious communities, the private sector, and governmental agencies to echo and amplify the voices and perspectives emerging from women’s organizations.
- Draw on each sector and organization’s unique competencies to ensure innovative mass outreach and build wider public participation in disseminating the vision, values, and messages of WASL members.
The Coming of Age of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda; 21 in 2021
The People and Perspectives Driving A Transformative Global Peace and Security Agenda.
The 21 in 2021 series is moderated by Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and features members of WASL alongside other individuals working as peacebuilders, delivering development humanitarian relief, working for justice and security sector reform and the prevention of sexual violence and violent extremism. The series is co-hosted by ICAN, the LSE Centre for Women Peace and Security and the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy,
Annual Forum
ICAN’s Women, Peace and Security Forum is an annual event dedicated to providing women peacebuilders and human rights defenders a safe space for learning, collaboration and solidarity. Forum participants are active members of WASL with demonstrable expertise in innovative practices, activism advocacy and thought leadership in the realm of women’s rights, peace, security and C/PVE.