WILPF advocated for an international forum for governments before the League of Nations and later the United Nations were created. We participated in UN meetings since the organization’s founding in 1945 and continue WILPF’s work for peace today at the UN in both Geneva and New York. This webinar will focus on WILPF’s advocacy and activism for disarmament through the UN, including our recent work to achieve the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and other agreements on the arms trade, autonomous weapons, and explosive weapons, and to promote gender diversity and feminist perspectives at the international level. We’ll also look at the ways that WILPF connects transnational advocacy at the UN with local and national movements for peace, justice, and disarmament globally, and why the UN is an important place for activism.

​

PeaceWomen was founded in 2000 to strengthen women’s rights and participation in international peace and security efforts.

​

It promotes feminist peace by strengthening women’s meaningful participation, transforming gendered power, and bridging local gender conflict analysis with global efforts to implement a holistic WPS Agenda. This builds on WILPF’s overall priorities of addressing root causes of violence with a feminist lens and mobilising for non-violent action.  

​

Based in the New York Office of WILPF, PeaceWomen facilitates monitoring of the United Nations system, with a particular focus on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, engages in advocacy work to strengthen the implementation across the UN system and provides effective outreach and capacity building to amplify and support local gendered conflict analysis and expertise.  

​

Ray brings an intersectional feminist approach to disarmament and antiwar work at the United Nations and beyond, though analysis, advocacy, and activism. Ray represents WILPF on the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) —which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for highlighting the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons and for working with governments to negotiate and adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—as well as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and the International Network on Explosive Weapons.

​

Ray has an Honors BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Toronto and an MA in Politics from The New School for Social Research. She is currently a Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton University’s Program on Science on Global Security and is completing a book about the nuclear ban and antinuclear activism to be published by Rowman and Littlefield.

​

* (To learn about the first UN General Assembly and the first resolution it passed, see our 24th October entry.)