Episodes 3 and 4 of the new 5-part Women, War & Peace will air on November 6. This series uncovers the untold stories of women’s strategic role in global conflict and peacemaking. Learn more about the two episodes below.
Peace Unveiled – November 6 at 5 p.m. ET
When the U.S. troop surge was announced in late 2009, women in Afghanistan knew that the ground was being laid for peace talks with the Taliban. Peace Unveiled follows three women who immediately began to organize to make sure that women have a seat at the negotiating table. One is a savvy parliamentarian who participated in writing the Afghan constitution that guarantees equality for women; another, a former midwife who is one of the last women’s rights advocates alive in Kandahar; and the third, a young activist who lives in a traditional family in Kabul. Convinced that the Taliban will have demands that jeopardize women’s hard-earned gains, they maneuver against formidable odds to have their voices heard in a peace jirga and high peace council. We go behind Kabul’s closed doors as the women’s case is made to U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues Melanne Verveer, General David Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who promises the women that “peace and justice can’t come at the cost of women and women’s lives.” But will this promise be kept? Narrated by Tilda Swinton. Directed by Gini Reticker. Produced by Claudia Rizzi. Written by Abigail E. Disney.
The War We Are Living – November 6 at 6 p.m. ET
If you ask Colombia’s city-dwellers and governing political class, they’ll tell you the country’s forty-year-old civil war is over. But The War We Are Living reveals the “other” Colombia, in rural areas far away from the capitol, where the war is all too real – and now the battle is over gold. In Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia’s Pacific southwest, two extraordinary Afro-Colombian women are fighting to hold onto the gold-rich land that has sustained their community through small-scale mining for centuries. Clemencia Carabali and Francia Marquez are part of a powerful network of female leaders, who found that in wartime women can organize more freely than men. As they defy paramilitary death threats and insist on staying on their land, Carabali and Marquez are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war. If they lose the battle, they and thousands of their neighbors will join Colombia’s four million people – most of them women and children – who have been uprooted from their homes and livelihoods. Narrated by Alfre Woodard. Produced by Oriana Zill de Granados. Written by Pamela Hogan and Oriana Zill de Granados.
