• Ninth SDC Home
• Concept Note
  • Globalization
  • Gender
  • Peace and Peoples' Rigths
  • Education
  • Environment
• Call for Papers
• Program
• Plenary
• Panels
• Abstracts
• Author's Guidelines
• Travel Information
• Indian Speakers
• Media
• Acknowledgements

• Historical Background

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Gender

Aside from the fact that gender has been and will continue to be a crosscutting issue at the SDPI SDCs, this year we plan to have panels exclusively dedicated to gender issues. The first panel will look at a women centered focus on conflict and resulting security issues for women both inside and outside the home. This panel will frame important SDPI research study conducted within the last year and discuss the policy implications as well as prescriptions that emerge not only from a Pakistani but also the South Asian experience. The second panel will look into gender and globalization and how economic integration has affected gender imbalances.

Panel 1: Women, conflict and security

This panel will explore the connections between conflict in the public sphere and its intensification in the private sphere. The speakers will analyze why women are silent or have few voices beyond being depicted as victims, whether of different forms of domestic violence, cultural violence, structural violence or state sponsored violence. This panel will also critically examine the manner in which gender issues are integrated in security discourses and indices, especially those developed by the UN and its affiliated agencies as well as security analysts and point to the limitations of such frameworks. The panel will make recommendations to engender the security discourse through practical policy prescriptions.

Contact:
Saba Gul Khattak, Executive Director, SDPI; and,
Kiran Habib, Project Associate, Women’s Land Rights, SDPI
Email: saba@sdpi.org and kiran@sdpi.org

Panel 2: The underbelly of globalization: Gender and economic integration in South Asia

Globalization in the form of progressive integration of economies and societies became relevant for South Asian countries across all sectors at latest since the beginning of the 1990s. Actors and affectees of increased trade and investment flows are presented in a socially abstract arithmetic, including a gender-neutral way. Yet, they have female and male features. Female Bangladeshi garment workers have become the icon of the country’s export successes. Workers’ remittances to the region are often earned by male migrants, changing gender roles in the sending households. Tourism to Nepal has drawn thousands of rural women out of agriculture into paid employment.

Despite a background of wide gender gaps in access to resources in the region, women’s roles in and experiences with tighter integration into the world economy are often made invisible. This raises the question of what the hidden costs of these changes are, how global economic integration has influenced and interacted with gender imbalances in South Asia. The panel addresses these questions and looks for ways how globalization can benefit gender equality and women’s empowerment in South Asia.

Contact:
Karin Astrid Siegmann, Junior Research Fellow, SDPI
Email: kiran@sdpi.org