We fled and left everything behind, and we have nowhere to go. Women’s Agency in Conflict and Peace Historically, the dominant narrative of war has been about securing national boundaries and protecting civilian life. However, these narratives have often been riddled with tales of male heroism driven by love for wife or mother. Weaved within these narratives is the thread that men’s lives are hard and that they must fight to protect and keep women safe – women who are then perceived as weak and dependent on male power for survival. This has led to the persistent representation of women solely as victims of war and conflict. The statistics are clear: more men take up arms than women; more men go to the warfront than women; more men have historically died at warfronts and in battle than women. However, what is war? Do we stay within the traditional confines of the definition of war, or do we go beyond to see the cross sectoral impact of war both on and off the warfront? Additionally, wars are no longer fought in specific locations; they have reached the home front where women become active participants with or without their consent. Recognising women’s agency therefore shifts the focus from what is done to them, to what they do, which is vital for developing strategies and processes for inclusion at all levels of decision-making. The definitions of peace and the reality of peace in terms of cause, effect and solutions cannot be complete without women’s perspectives. When peace is simply defined as the absence of war, it negates other forms of violence that work against peace. It conceptualizes conflict and vio­lence as public and large scale, thereby limiting focus on other forms of violence and conflict that women encoun­ter daily in the private space and structurally. Similarly, constructions of war have historically narrowed the scope of understanding its effects. Clausewitz in 1832 32 defined war simply as the continuation of politics by other means, while Wright(1942) 33 defined it as armed force. Discours­es about and semantics of war are still influenced and dominated by historical“white” narratives. These defini­tions also systematically omit the role of women in war, and then in peacebuilding, given their historic underrep­resentation in politics and government. However, recent definitions have expanded the discourse on war to include organized crime and human rights violations, through networks of state and non-state actors 34 . Contemporary definitions expand the discourse on war to include human trafficking, white slavery and other forms of organized crime that enslave and exploit women’s bodies and labour. In this vein, women’s civil society work becomes recognised as they continuously participate to break the chains of human trafficking especially of women and girls. During conflicts, they have significantly contributed to freeing young girls from the clutches of armed fighters and terrorist groups. This has been the case with wom­en- led organisations in the Far North of Cameroon, faced with the Boko Haram Insurgency. One of feminism’s tasks is to expose, through a“feminist curiosity,” how“patriarchy – in all its varied guises, camou­flaged, khaki clad, and pin-striped – is a principal cause both of the outbreak of violent societal conflicts and of the international community’s frequent failures in pro­viding long-term resolutions to those violent conflicts. 35 ” Moreover, feminists observe that the exclusion of women from the public realm results in an unjust social order that is antithetical to peace. when violence against women is sanctioned by society, it leads to the acceptability of violence against several others, hence to the sanctioning and acceptability of war and the preparation for war. 36 This underscores the imperative of women’s agency, which challenges the limiting victim- only narrative, centers intersectionality, and advances more effective peacebuild­ing strategies that confront entrenched power structures and are aligned with the principles of the United Nations Security Council Resolution(UNSCR 1325). 37 In this vein, 32 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. And trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 33 Quincy Wright, A Study of War, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965 34 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 3 rd ed. Standford: Stanford University Press, 201 35 Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004 36 Betty A. Reardon, Sexism and the War System(New York: Teachers College Press, 1985), 40. 37 Carol Cohn, Helen Kinsella, and Sheri Gibbings,“Women, Peace and Security Resolution 1325,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6, no. 1(2004): 130–140. 11 Gender Justice Competence Center Sub-Saharan Africa