Women and Peace: Peace Agenda of Women and Her Peace Movements in the Southernmost Provinces of Thailand

Abstract

The unrests in the southernmost provinces of Thailand which have risen for 15 years since 2004 result in both direct and indirect losses to people in the whole country. Meanwhile, such unrests contribute to the Deep South women working in CSO in various social issues to realize the importance to get organized and drive social issues that affect their normal lives, especially the issue of peace. For this reason, "Peace Agenda of Women: PAOW" was formed in 2015 as a social women platform. PAOW comprises women from 23 organizations, aiming to advocate gender sensitive peace proposals. This article poses a question how does PAOW perform their peace movements? The purpose of this article is to understand and explain 1) PAOW’s peace activities 2) feedbacks on PAOW’s Peace movements by using gender lens. The study shows that working as network 1) help women expand their working area from soft issue as healing victims to hard issue as security 2) has its significance of creating women working sphere where they could perform and rise essential issues on peace process namely safe public space. Even PAOW’s peace proposals were acknowledged by the general public as well as the key actors in the unrest area, namely, the Thai state and the insurgents, but their requests of having women in the more visible role in the peace process are questioned in term of appropriateness and have not been effective.