Women’s Role in Indonesian Peace Initiatives: Grassroots Dialogues to Policy Advocacy

When ethnic and religious conflicts erupted across Indonesia in the late 1990s and early 2000s, women emerged as crucial peacebuilders. From keeping markets open during the Poso conflict to organizing inter-religious dialogues in Ambon, Indonesian women demonstrated that sustainable peace requires their active participation. Yet their vital grassroots work has rarely translated into formal recognition at policy tables, highlighting a persistent gap between women’s contributions to peace and their representation in official processes.

Resolving Indonesia’s ethnic and religious conflicts
The global gap in women’s peace participation
Women as grassroots peacebuilders in Indonesian conflicts
Keeping markets open across religious divides
Leading inter-religious dialogue and reconciliation
Bridging the gap to policy levels
The importance of elevating women’s participation
Indonesia’s potential for regional leadership
From workshops to substantive policy campaigns

Resolving Indonesia’s ethnic and religious conflicts

Indonesia has managed to peacefully resolve several violent conflicts that threatened the nation’s stability. The conflicts in Aceh, Maluku, and Poso claimed thousands of lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people between 1998 and 2005. These conflicts emerged after the fall of President Suharto, when decades of suppressed ethnic and religious tensions finally erupted into violence.

The Maluku sectarian conflict between Christians and Muslims from 1999 to 2002 resulted in at least 5,000 deaths and displaced approximately 700,000 people. The Poso conflict in Central Sulawesi followed a similar pattern, while Aceh experienced a 29-year separatist conflict that ended with the 2005 Helsinki Peace Agreement.

While these conflicts have largely been resolved through formal peace agreements, the role of women in achieving and sustaining peace remains critically underrecognized. Women’s contributions at the grassroots level were essential to ending violence, yet their participation in formal peace negotiations was minimal.

The global gap in women’s peace participation

Indonesia’s experience reflects a worldwide problem. Despite the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000, which called for increased women’s participation in peace processes, progress has been disappointingly slow.

Recent data reveals the severity of this gap. In 2023, just 9.6 percent of peace negotiators globally were women. Even more striking, women made up only 7 percent of negotiators on average worldwide last year, and nearly nine out of ten negotiation tracks included no women negotiators at all.

UNSCR 1325 emphasizes the need for gender perspectives in peace negotiations, repatriation, resettlement, and post-conflict reconstruction. The resolution recognizes that women experience conflict differently and bring unique insights to peacebuilding. Yet translating this recognition into action has proven challenging, even as 108 UN member states have adopted National Action Plans to implement the resolution’s principles.

Women as grassroots peacebuilders in Indonesian conflicts

Despite their exclusion from formal peace processes, Indonesian women played transformative roles in ending violence at the community level. Their actions during the Ambon and Poso conflicts demonstrate how women address the social and economic drivers of violence that formal negotiations often overlook.

Keeping markets open across religious divides

One of the most powerful examples of women’s peacebuilding came through economic activity. During the intense religious polarization in Ambon and Poso, women insisted on keeping markets open and crossed religious lines to bring their produce to sell. This seemingly simple act had profound implications for peace.

Women traders, known as mama-mama papalele in Ambon, traveled between Christian and Muslim territories when few others dared. They maintained economic ties and human connections during the worst periods of violence. After conflicts ended, women were often the first to resume economic activity in markets, helping rebuild trust between communities.

Leading inter-religious dialogue and reconciliation

Women also organized interfaith initiatives that brought divided communities together. In Ambon, the Gerakan Perempuan Peduli (Concerned Women’s Movement) was established in 1999 by Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim women leaders. The group created the “Conscience of Women” manifesto, calling on government authorities to stop violence and for Christians and Muslims to reconcile.

In Poso, women-focused organizations like LiBu Perempuan promoted reconciliation, countered extremist ideologies, and provided safe spaces for survivors to heal. Women organized reconciliation tours where Christian and Muslim women visited destroyed houses and places of worship together, helping both groups understand each other’s losses.

These grassroots efforts were effective because women were typically perceived as non-threatening and were able to influence men and husbands to lay down their weapons. They addressed community-level concerns about local economies, family safety, and social relations that formal peace talks often ignored.

Bridging the gap to policy levels

While women excelled at grassroots peacebuilding, their absence from formal peace negotiations created serious gaps in addressing post-conflict needs. Consultations with communities in Ambon, Poso, and West Kalimantan revealed a lack of attention to resettlement of internally displaced persons (IDPs), compensation for lost property, and other vital ingredients for long-term reconciliation.

The exclusion of women from policy-level discussions was stark. In the Helsinki peace agreement that ended the Aceh conflict, only one woman participated as an advisor to the Free Aceh Movement. The Malino peace processes for Poso and Maluku included only a handful of women representatives.

This exclusion meant that issues central to women’s experiences and community recovery received insufficient attention. Women understand the practical needs of rebuilding communities because they manage households, care for children and elderly, and maintain social networks. Their insights into IDP resettlement, trauma healing, and economic recovery are essential for sustainable peace.

The importance of elevating women’s participation

Elevating women from grassroots activism to formal peace processes is not just about fairness. Research shows that peace agreements with women signatories are longer lasting. Women bring attention to issues that affect entire communities and help ensure that peace agreements address root causes of conflict rather than just immediate security concerns.

Indonesia has begun recognizing this gap. The country has implemented UNSCR 1325 through the National Action Plan for the Protection and Empowerment of Women and Children during Social Conflicts and the National Action Plan on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism. Both plans highlight gender equality and women’s leadership as essential to sustainable peace.

Indonesia’s potential for regional leadership

Indonesia is uniquely positioned to champion women’s roles in peacemaking at regional and international levels. The nation has a strong history of women’s participation in public life, dating back to the nationalist struggle for independence when the first national women’s congress was held in 1928.

Most significantly, Indonesia elected Megawati Sukarnoputri as president from 2001 to 2004, making her the first woman to lead the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. This demonstrated that Indonesian society could accept women in the highest leadership positions.

However, translating this historical legacy into sustained support for women in peace processes requires moving beyond symbolic gestures. Indonesia needs to ensure that women peacebuilders receive adequate funding, that their organizations have seats at peace tables, and that gender perspectives are integrated into all aspects of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction.

As a major player in ASEAN and a country that has successfully navigated multiple peace processes, Indonesia can lead regional efforts to implement UNSCR 1325 more effectively. This means advocating for gender quotas in peace delegations, funding women’s peace organizations, and sharing lessons learned from grassroots peacebuilding successes.

From workshops to substantive policy campaigns

The challenge now is to move beyond awareness-raising workshops to substantive policy changes that give women real decision-making power. This requires several concrete steps:

First, formal peace processes must include women negotiators and ensure their meaningful participation, not token representation. Second, governments and international organizations need to provide sustained funding to local women’s organizations working on peacebuilding, which currently receive only 0.3 percent of official development assistance despite their critical role.

Third, post-conflict policies must address the issues women identify as priorities, including IDP resettlement, compensation mechanisms, trauma support, and economic recovery programs. Fourth, women’s expertise in peacebuilding should inform national security strategies and conflict prevention efforts.

Indonesia’s experience shows that women’s peacebuilding work is already happening at the grassroots level. The question is whether political leaders will recognize, support, and elevate this work to the policy levels where it can have the greatest impact on creating lasting peace.

What do you think? How can countries better ensure that women’s grassroots peacebuilding expertise translates into formal policy influence? What would it take for Indonesia to fulfill its potential as a regional leader in advancing women’s participation in peace processes?

References

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Women’s Role in Indonesian Peace Initiatives: Grassroots Dialogues to Policy Advocacy

Table of Contents

Resolving Indonesia’s ethnic and religious conflicts 🔗

The global gap in women’s peace participation 🔗

Women as grassroots peacebuilders in Indonesian conflicts 🔗

Keeping markets open across religious divides 🔗

Leading inter-religious dialogue and reconciliation 🔗

Bridging the gap to policy levels 🔗

The importance of elevating women’s participation 🔗

Indonesia’s potential for regional leadership 🔗

From workshops to substantive policy campaigns 🔗