Sanam also wants to pitch in and certainly she's responsible.
The JRR model is targeting justice and security professionals in fragile states; it's seeking to train individuals from those states. It's training them in international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law. Certainly an argument could be made that these are international laws. This is not about imposing western or northern positions or internationally agreed frameworks. Many of the people who are deployed to commissions of inquiry or to regional or international criminal tribunals are people from the region or from fragile states. It's a remarkably democratic initiative in that sense.
It also has another element, which is very interesting, an apprenticeship or mentoring component where specialists in international law—police, magistrates, and so on—work side by side with people in fragile state settings.
Rather than imposing anything, they work with people, look at their portfolio, look at the challenges they are facing, and provide support. This is hugely valuable, and also takes advantage of the fact that a number of international criminal tribunals have closed, releasing a wealth of expertise that can be sent to the regional levels to support strengthening justice responses there.
The same is not true when it comes to the kind of thing I was talking about, a global repository, a community of practice on mediation, on constitution building skills, and so on. There are plenty of experts around. Sanam knows most of them in Islam, but more has to be done to build up that wealth of knowledge.
When it comes to imposing a foreign model, we hear this all the time. Of course one of the things that's very important is women's role in peace building, in promoting equality, comes from societies all around the world, often predating western feminist movements.
I'd like to give an example of how this kind of thing can work so effectively and not be seen as an external imposition.
In 2011, Swisspeace and UN Women, jointly trained women up and down the coast of West Africa in mediation skills, peace building, and engaging in constitutional reform. It was really interesting training. It lasted two weeks. These were women who had been ministers of gender, who had run NGOs and private sector organizations, been in government and out, and it was all over West Africa.
Six months later the Islamist groups and radical groups took over the north of Mali. Three of the women who had been trained in this course marched into UN Women's office saying there had been a horrible invasion, and President Compaoré in Burkina Faso next door was holding peace negotiations and preliminary ceasefire talks, and not a single woman from the women's group had been invited. What was the point of training them if they were not invited?
So UN Women put them on a plane, and they got in there, but the point is they were able to use the networks they had developed and the training—much more important than the content—and the networks to call up people in Burkina Faso, to call up women up and down the West African coast, to lobby for their inclusion. They ended up being successful.
This kind of thing isn't seen as a foreign imposition at all, these were women in Mali who took it upon themselves to get themselves to the table.