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Women, War & Peace, a new five-hour series airing at 9pm Tuesdays through October and November, is a comprehensive global media initiative on women’s strategic role in global conflict.  Women, War & Peace challenges the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain and places women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security. Featuring narrators Matt Damon, Tilda Swinton, Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard, the series reveals that the majority of today’s conflicts are not fought by nations and their armies, but rather by gangs, insurgent groups, and warlords armed with small arms and improvised weapons.  Women have become primary targets in these conflicts and though they are suffering unprecedented casualties they are simultaneously emerging as critical partners in brokering peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict.  With depth and complexity, Women, War & Peace spotlights the stories of women in conflict zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan, and Colombia to Liberia.

November 8 – War Redefined

War Redefined, the capstone of Women, War & Peace, reframes our understanding of modern warfare through incisive interviews with leading thinkers, Secretaries of State, and seasoned survivors of war and peace-making. Their insights reveal how the post-Cold War proliferation of small arms has changed the landscape of war, so that in many conflicts today it is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier. Simultaneously, they describe how women are changing the rules of engagement in conflict hotspots all over the world. War Redefined includes probing conversations with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her female predecessors, Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright; Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee; Bosnian war crimes investigator Fadila Memisevic; Zainab Salbi, Founder of Women for Women International; globalization expert Moises Naim; and Cynthia Enloe of Clark University, among others. Narrated by Geena Davis. Produced and Written by Peter Bull. Co-produced by Nina Chaudry.

Women, War & Peace, a new five-hour series airing at 9pm Tuesdays through October and November, is a comprehensive global media initiative on women’s strategic role in global conflict.  A co-production of THIRTEEN and Fork Films, Women, War & Peace challenges the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain and places women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security. Featuring narrators Matt Damon, Tilda Swinton, Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard, the series reveals that the majority of today’s conflicts are not fought by nations and their armies, but rather by gangs, insurgent groups, and warlords armed with small arms and improvised weapons.  Women have become primary targets in these conflicts and though they are suffering unprecedented casualties they are simultaneously emerging as critical partners in brokering peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict.  With depth and complexity, Women, War & Peace spotlights the stories of women in conflict zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan, and Colombia to Liberia.

November 1 – The War We Are Living

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. Written by Pamela Hogan and Oriana Zill de Granados. Produced by Oriana Zill de Granados.

Women, War & Peace, a new five-hour series airing at 9pm Tuesdays through October and November, is a comprehensive global media initiative on women’s strategic role in global conflict.  A co-production of THIRTEEN and Fork Films, Women, War & Peace challenges the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain and places women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security. Featuring narrators Matt Damon, Tilda Swinton, Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard, the series reveals that the majority of today’s conflicts are not fought by nations and their armies, but rather by gangs, insurgent groups, and warlords armed with small arms and improvised weapons.  Women have become primary targets in these conflicts and though they are suffering unprecedented casualties they are simultaneously emerging as critical partners in brokering peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict.  With depth and complexity, Women, War & Peace spotlights the stories of women in conflict zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan, and Colombia to Liberia.

October 25 – Peace Unveiled

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. Written by Abigail E. Disney. Produced by Claudia Rizzi.

Women, War & Peace, a new five-hour series airing at 9pm Tuesdays through October and November, is a comprehensive global media initiative on women’s strategic role in global conflict.  A co-production of THIRTEEN and Fork Films, Women, War & Peace challenges the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain and places women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security. Featuring narrators Matt Damon, Tilda Swinton, Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard, the series reveals that the majority of today’s conflicts are not fought by nations and their armies, but rather by gangs, insurgent groups, and warlords armed with small arms and improvised weapons.  Women have become primary targets in these conflicts and though they are suffering unprecedented casualties they are simultaneously emerging as critical partners in brokering peace and as leaders in forging new international laws governing conflict.  With depth and complexity, Women, War & Peace spotlights the stories of women in conflict zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan, and Colombia to Liberia.

October 11 – I Came to Testify

When the Balkans exploded into war in the 1990s, reports that tens of thousands of women were being systematically raped as a tactic of ethnic cleansing captured the international spotlight. I Came to Testify is the moving story of how a group of 16 women who had been imprisoned by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history’s great silence – and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law. Now, as Bosnia is once again in the headlines with the capture of Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic, the women agree to speak for the first time since then, on condition that we keep their identities hidden for their protection. “Witness 99,” who was held at gunpoint for a month with dozens of other women in a sports hall in the center of town remembers: “We were treated like animals. But that was the goal: to kill a woman’s dignity.” Their remarkable courage resulted in a triumphant verdict that led to new international laws about sexual violence in war. Returning to Bosnia 16 years after the end of the conflict, I Came to Testify also explores the chasm between this seismic legal shift and the post-war justice experienced by most of Bosnia’s women war survivors. Narrated by Matt Damon. Produced and Written by Pamela Hogan.