Photo by Katrina Elises, Report by Guia Rebollido and Lourenz Jay Loregas
By giving inputs to the National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) and presenting their research findings to several relevant officials, the MSU-GSC Sasakawa research team provided peace-building resources for conflictual communities in Mindanao, during the International Forum on WPS, and Masculinities, at the Grand Summit Hotel, General Santos City, November 15.
Composed of field professionals, Dr. Jovanie C. Espesor, Dr. Lolymar Jacinto-Reyes, and Dr. Jovar Pantao, the research team’s project on masculinities, gender equality, and peacebuilding aims to investigate the influence of masculinities in peacebuilding in the areas of Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).
In an interview, Dr. Espesor, the project leader and security specialist, explained further the motivation behind the project.
“For us to better understand violence in conflictual communities, we have to understand how people see men in conceptions of masculinities because, in other settings where conflict is also present, there is evidence that toxic or violent masculinity is actually caused by the traumatic impacts of war. So, we’re trying to validate that here in Mindanao as well with two areas in Indonesia,” Dr. Espesor stated.
Key officials present at the forum were MSU system president, Atty. Basari D. Mapupuno; Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF) executive director, Itsu Adachi; SPF peace-building program manager, Maho Nakayama-Sato; Consul-General of Japan Consular Office in Davao, H.E. Yoshihisa Ishikawa; BARMM Attorney-General and Majority Floor Leader of the Bangsamoro Parliament, Atty. Sha Elijah Dumama-Alba; Gender Inclusion Specialist, Professor Rufa Cagoco-Guiam; while the chairperson of the Bangsamoro Women Commission of the BARMM, Hadja Bainon G. Karon, and the General Santos City Mayor, Hon. Lorelie G. Pacquiao, were duly represented.
MSU as epistemological knowledge center
Dr. Espesor also pointed out that this project presents an opportunity for MSU to earn the reputation and the claim of being the epistemological knowledge center when it comes to WPS and masculinities.
“As I have mentioned, we are giving inputs to the national action plan on WPS which is actually a great opportunity for a Mindanao university to do that and not a national university based in Manila. We are happy that our partners from the Bangsamoro Regional Government are very respective and welcoming of this initiative,” Dr. Espesor remarked.
Furthermore, he asserted that it also presents an opportunity for MSU to reinforce the claim of being the National Peace University and that MSU is in the best position to lead the conversation about WPS as well as masculinities because MSU has concrete evidence that it is producing knowledge in the area of gender equality, and peacebuilding, particularly in focus on WPS and masculinities.
MSU-Gensan’s biggest international peace project
According to Dr. Espesor, the Gender Equality, Masculinities, and Peacebuilding project is the biggest international project of the Mindanao State University - General Santos.
The project is in partnership with Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Integral Asia in Indonesia, with the help of Conciliation Resources, funded by the SPF.
Mako Nakayama, director of the SPF, said that the conceptualization of the project started three years back, and was driven by their interest of the disparities found in the WPS agenda.
Nakayama also stated that the MSU-Gensan conducted their research through the use of a questionnaire regarding gender income gap, educational attainment, and perceptions on the gender division of labor or how people accept women leaders, experience of violence and state of mental health.
The team also held focus group discussions and key informant interviews from September 2022 to April 2023 and collected enormous data with regards to gender relations and masculinity.
When asked about the challenges their team faced during the conduct of the study in BARMM, Dr. Espesor expressed the difficulty that comes with dealing with a huge data set of over 2,000 respondents spread across Maguindanao and Lanao Del Sur.
“We have used all our social and political connections in order to get those data on board to the research team for analysis. We are happy that all data are in and it's only due for analysis,” he said.
According to Espesor, there are talks with their research partners that the peace project will also expand to other island provinces.
The project’s vision
During the presentation of his paper titled "Making the Invisible, Visible: The Future of Integrating WPS in Higher Education Curriculum," Dr. Pantao explored the envisioned integration of WPS into higher education curriculum by the year 2040.
In the subsequent open forum, Dr. Marilen Danguilan, MSC, MPA, a Public Health Expert and a friend of SPF, raised the question of whether "integration" in this context entails only embedding WPS across various existing courses within the curriculum, and if it is, why could it not be a stand-alone subject.
Dr. Pantao elucidated the dual nature of integration which is incorporating it into the entire higher education curriculum—this is where they can officer a separate course as pointed out by Dr. Danguilan when she drew a comparison with the diploma course in WPS at MSU-Maguindanao, emphasizing that it is currently a stand-alone program and the sole course of its kind in entire Southeast Asia—and another approach is embedding it within specific subject topics or particular course.
“We can do both integrations. Whether we offer integration to the higher education curriculum as a whole, or offering a separate diploma course,” Dr. Pantao cleared out.
Comments