The WISCOMP project was set up in 1999 as part of the efforts of the Foundation to build a culture of coexistence and nonviolence that is gender-sensitive and inclusive. Planned as a South Asian initiative, WISCOMP facilitates the leadership of women in areas of peace, security and international affairs. It provides a unique interface between academia and the NGO sector, and positions its works at the confluence of security studies, conflict transformation and peacebuilding. The intersection of these with gender concerns provides the focus of its programs.

The initiative strives to:

• Enhance the role of women as peacebuilders, negotiators and as agents for nonviolent social change.
• Empower a new generation of women and men with the expertise and skills to engage in peace activism through educational and training programs in Conflict Transformation.
• Contribute to an inclusive, people-oriented discourse on issues of security, which respects diversity and which foregrounds the perspectives of women and the hitherto marginalized.
• Facilitate theory-building and innovative research on holistic paradigms that address the resolution and transformation of intra-and inter-state conflicts.
• Build synergy at various levels – between theory, practice and policy; between those working in academia, in the formal structures of foreign policy and diplomacy and those engaged in grassroots peacebuilding.
• Build constituencies of peace through training, research and praxis in areas such as multi-track diplomacy, peace advocacy, active coexistence and cross-border civil society dialogues.
• Work with educational institutions to engender a culture of peace through the development of curricula and innovative pedagogy.

[ Click here to go to WISCOMP website... ]