Women, Peace and Cybersecurity: Promoting Women’s Peace and Security in the Digital World (2021-2023) for the Asia Pacific region

Summary

With generous support from the Government of the Republic of Korea and the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade, UN Women is implementing the Women, Peace and Cybersecurity: Promoting Women’s Peace and Security in the Digital World programme. This project is part of the UN Women Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific Regional Framework Towards Peaceful, Inclusive Societies: Advancing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda and Inclusive Governance in the Asia Pacific Region. Cybersecurity is recognized as a key emerging issue under the framework, and the programme falls under both its pillars; Pillar 1 – Women, Peace and Security, and Pillar 2 – Inclusive Governance.

Details

Aim

The programme aims to promote the Women, Peace and Security agenda to ensure that women, including young women, lead and participate at all levels of ICT policy and decision-making, while contributing to the implementation of UN Women’s Regional Framework Towards Peaceful, Inclusive Societies: Advancing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda and Inclusive Governance in the Asia Pacific Region. UN Women is aiming to create multi-stakeholder platforms for women’s civil society representatives and subject-matter experts to influence the design, audit and governance of technologies, digital platforms and cybersecurity-related areas to accelerate momentum for gender-responsive approaches to gendered security challenges in the digital age

It further aims to:

• Enhance digital literacy, awareness and sound cybersecurity practices for women in all their diversity;
• Engage in whole-of-society legal and policy reform that strives to harmonize cybersecurity, national security and international security frameworks.

Context

Given the critical underrepresentation of women in leadership and decision-making spaces related to cybersecurity, technology development, and peacebuilding, measures are still missing to mitigate the gendered implications of these risks. More on the context of the project can be found on the publication of the Cybersecurity aspect of the project.

Outcomes

• Support in conflict-sensitive and gender-response cybersecurity legal and policy reform;
• Promotion of women’s leadership in cybersecurity in the region;
• Strengthened capacities and resilience for women to stay safe from and to combat cyber-enabled crimes and technological vulnerabilities;
• Promotion of gender-response cybersecurity under international law and principles;
• Increased participation of women in cyberdiplomacy and cybersecurity negotiations.

Outputs

• UN Women has conducted a mapping of cyber-related laws and policies across the region and consulted with women’s CSOs, think tanks, and young cyber defenders on cybersecurity priorities for the region. UN Women is currently developing policy recommendations based on this research.
• The results and best practices from the programme will be used for advocacy purposes to influence policy-making elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region.
• Milestone research conducted by UN Women on the cybersecurity implications of implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Southeast Asia are published.

Activities

The Women, Peace and Cybersecurity – Promoting Women’s Peace and Security in the Digital World programme is currently implemented regionally in Southeast Asia, with country-level activities in the Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam.

• UN Women is working closely with governments in the region, with a specific focus on the Philippines, Thailand and Viet Nam, to advance a more conflict-sensitive and gender-responsive cybersecurity agenda.
• UN Women supports women CSOs and women human rights defenders to identify key needs and means of strengthening their cybersecurity practices and resilience. UN Women is also building the capacities of law enforcement bodies to address these security risk.
• UN Women is also providing technical inputs and advocating for conflict-sensitive and gender-responsive cybersecurity approaches in the development of the ASEAN Regional Plan of Action for Women, Peace and Security.
• UN Women stresses the importance of supporting women’s (particularly young women’s) negotiators’ and cyberdefenders’ access to high-level decision-making spaces, and will continue to strengthen the capacities of women-led negotiator networks to advocate for locally grounded, conflict-sensitive and gender-responsive cybersecurity.
• UN Women is analysing and raising awareness on the gendered dynamics and impacts of these harms to better inform policy reform and to enhance prevention, response and recovery efforts for ICT-facilitated harms and crimes.

For the future: UN Women is seeking to expand the geographic scope of the programme beyond Southeast Asia. UN Women envisions close engagement under the following intervention areas: regional-level activities, country-level activities (as of October 2022), within Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Myanmar, Thailand, Lao PDR, Viet Nam, Philippines, and Cambodia.