Renowned Northern Ireland Peace Negotiator Monica McWilliams to Speak on Campus March 28

“When you want to change the world, where do you get started?” says Monica McWilliams. “What steps can you take? You need to know how to make an action plan. And then from quite ordinary activities you can fall into extraordinary times. That’s what happened to me.”

In 1996 McWilliams helped form a political party, the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC), and won a seat to the multi-party peace talks that culminated in the landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement, ending three decades of violent sectarian conflict.

The hostility that we faced as women, the misogyny, the inhumane treatment, the humiliations. It was really difficult. So that’s part of what I want to talk about. How do you build and keep your self esteem when you’re told you don’t belong? How do you turn around and make it work?

In a public talk on March 28, McWilliams will reflect on these negotiations, the role of women in peace processes, and her many experiences in the world of post-conflict justice, including as an elected legislator in Northern Ireland, chief commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, and advisor to peacebuilding efforts in countries around the world, including Colombia, Syria, Myanmar, Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

She will also offer advice to people hoping to use activism and the political process to make a difference in their own communities. 

Making History in Northern Ireland

The NIWC was a unique presence at Northern Ireland’s peace talks. Its members included people from both sides of the conflict. Perhaps just as shockingly, they were all women––which, in the political culture of the time, made them targets for abuse. 

“The hostility that we faced as women, the misogyny, the inhumane treatment, the humiliations. It was really difficult,” McWilliams recalls. “So that’s part of what I want to talk about. How do you build and keep your self esteem when you’re told you don’t belong? How do you turn around and make it work?”

Thanks to the NIWC’s involvement in the talks, the Good Friday Agreement ended up addressing several issues it would not have otherwise, including victims reparations, the need for a civic forum on social, economic and cultural issues, the needs of young people, and the rights of women. After the agreement was passed, McWilliams was elected to Northern Ireland’s legislative assembly to help make sure it was implemented. To this day, she’s on the commission to end remaining paramilitary activity within local communities.

Connecting War and Domestic Life

Much of McWilliams’s academic research has been on domestic violence, with an emphasis on its relationship to broader conflicts. “When people talk about ending war, disarmament, that sort of thing, they’re mostly focusing on the warriors in the street,” she says. “What they’re not focusing on is the fact that, after war is officially over, those so-called warriors are still in the home. The intimate partner abuse was there before, during and after the conflict. So when we speak of the cessation of hostilities in a transition from conflict that also needs to be factored in.” 

Her attention to these issues informs her approach to peace negotiations. “You need to put mechanisms in place that do more than just stop the immediate fighting. You need to address the forces of violence in society.”

McWilliams will be in conversation with Louise Mallinder, deputy director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queen’s University, Belfast. Mallinder is the Pozen Visiting Professor this Spring quarter. The talk starts at 6p.m on March 28, on the third floor of Ida Noyes Hall. Learn more and register.