ABOUT THE ISSUE
Women have become primary targets in today’s armed conflicts and are suffering unprecedented casualties. Simultaneously, they are emerging as necessary partners in brokering lasting peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict. Yet the image of war portrayed by the media covers very little of either end of this spectrum — until now. Discussions about the multiplicity of women’s roles in war and peace are underway in boardrooms, conference halls, and on the floor of the U.N., but the media has lagged behind, offering images of women in conflict situations that are rarely nuanced and portraying them solely as collateral damage — when they are seen as “a story” at all.
ABOUT THE SERIES
WIDE ANGLE is planning a bold new mini-series Women, War & Peace to challenge the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain and to place women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security. Women, War & Peace will focus on women’s strategic role in the post-Cold War era, where globalization, arms trafficking, and illicit trade have intersected to create a whole new type of war.
Women, War & Peace will present its groundbreaking message across the globe using all forms of media, including U.S. and international primetime television, radio, print, and web. PBS and WIDE ANGLE are proud to be the first to bring this conversation to primetime national television. Planned for broadcast in 2010, Women, War & Peace will be the most comprehensive global media initiative ever mounted on the roles of women in war and peace.
Women, War & Peace is spearheaded by producers Gini Reticker and Abigail Disney. The 4-part series will launch with the U.S. television premiere of their previous collaboration, the acclaimed Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about the role women played in bringing peace to Liberia after 14 years of civil war. The film won Best Documentary Prize at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, the Silverdocs Witness Award, the Jackson Hole Audience Award, and has been short-listed for the Academy Award for best documentary.
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Hi! This is a remarkable story how the women in Liberia after suffering through years of war peacefully stopped the bloodshed and violence. Forced the dictator out of the country and now run the country. A woman president, majority in the cabinet and have taken positive actions by creating support mechanisms not only economically, but also socially by empowerment. I wish everyone could have seen the short presentation on pbs tonite. If you can find it on youtube or other means I’d highly recommend it if you can’t wait until 2010! Why the national media has not broadcast this is unbelievable. Maybe Africa and the world can change peacefully after all!
I was deeply moved and very impressed by these women. They give me hope that one day there may be peace in this world.
Hello,
Leymah and women can change the world. The whole concept is as Disney stated in the interview, “classic Gandhi nonviolence,” therefore if women rally utilizing nonviolence, with a King or Gandhi type plan, they could change the world. Please investigate a plan, or guideline, called a Global Strategy of Nonviolence, For the Children. (www.GSofNV.org). Thank you PBS. Thank you James.
Thank you Leymah and Abilgail.
I also was impressed by this woman and all the women of Liberia; they are remarkibly brave. Hopefully the story will appear on utube and twitter and anywhere women can make this much of a difference. Hopefully this could work worldwide; Afganistan would be a greatly needed place to end the killing war.
The world in the past has been ruled by force and man has dominated over woman by reason of his more forceful and aggressive qualities both of body and mind. But the scales are already shifting, force is losing its weight, and mental alertness, intuition and the spiritual qualities of love and service, in which woman is strong, are gaining ascendancy. Hence the new age will be an age less masculine and more permeated with the feminine ideals, or, to speak more exactly, will be an age in which the masculine and feminine elements of civilization will be more properly balanced.
~Abdul’Baha
1844-1921