Students present research on international women’s rights to policymakers

In April, students from Penn Law’s seminar on International Women’s Rights presented their research during a forum at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. The seminar was taught by Rangita de Silva de Alwis, the Law School’s Associate Dean for International Programs. In this video feature, students from the course discuss their work on women’s rights and the trip to meet with policymakers and researchers.

Transcript:

Akila Sarathy L’18: We’re here at the U.S. Institute of Peace to present our papers on countries and women’s issues that relate to national security.

Leah Wong L’18: Our cohort from Penn Law is mostly focusing on the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325. 1325 basically says every country is responsible for preventing violations of women’s rights, including women in peaceful transitions and post-conflict reconstructions of countries, and most of all protecting women from gender-based violence.

Samantha Licata L’18: We’re here at like the policymaking table. We have lawmakers, and students from other universities, and from other countries. We have professors, researchers, we have policymakers. We have a ton of different voices, here, that we get to, you know, share our ideas and get some good feedback on how to actually implement those ideas.

Satyasiri Atluri LLM’17: My paper is on introducing transgender perspective to international women’s peace and security agenda, in which I will be looking at the role that transgender perspective can play in bringing a more gender dimension to women, peace, and security instead of a more woman’s dimension to peace and security.

Akila Sarathy L’18: As a group, we’re going to be putting together all of our publications into one volume and having that shared with people at U.N. Women and other organizations and seeing how those are implemented.

Samantha Licata L’18: So having the ability in the seminar to pick something we feel passionate about and then dive so deeply into the research and have a mentor there who’s kind of guiding us, has been an experience that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise in the law school.

To read Reimagining traditional approaches to women peace and security, please go to: https://issuu.com/pennlawits/docs/reimagining_traditional_approaches_?e=1420149/48675905