How to Lead a Successful Movement for Peace

In her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Corporation trustee Leymah Gbowee reflects on leading a nonviolent women’s movement that was pivotal in ending Liberia’s 14-year civil war in 2003

By Leymah GboweeAugust 11, 2023

Carnegie Reporter Fall 2023 Sustainable Peace in Africa

In 2011, Leymah Gbowee and fellow women’s rights activists gathered on a soccer field where they had once prayed for peace during the civil war in Liberia. Gbowee received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her role in leading the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace campaign, which played a pivotal role in ending Liberia’s 14-year civil war in 2003. (Credit: Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images)

Leymah Gbowee, a trustee of Carnegie Corporation of New York, led the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace campaign that brought together Christian and Muslim women in a nonviolent movement that played a pivotal role in ending Liberia’s civil war in 2003. In 2011, Gbowee was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected female president, and Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist, politician, and activist, for their “nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.” In her acceptance speech, edited and reprinted here, she reminds us of the role that individuals can play through courage and conviction in achieving peace.

Early 2003, seven of us women gathered in a makeshift office/conference room to discuss the Liberian civil war and the fast-approaching war on the capital Monrovia. Armed with nothing but our conviction and 10 United States dollars, the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace campaign was born.

Women had become the “toy of war” for overdrugged young militias. Sexual abuse and exploitation spared no woman; we were raped and abused regardless of our age, religious, or social status. A common scene daily was a mother watching her young one being forcibly recruited, or her daughter being taken away as the wife of another drug-emboldened fighter.

We used our pain, broken bodies, and scarred emotions to confront the injustices and terror of our nation. We were aware that the end of the war will only come through nonviolence, as we had all seen that the use of violence was taking us and our beloved country deeper into the abyss of pain, death, and destruction.

The situation in Liberia in those war years indeed reaffirmed the profound statement of Nobel laureate Dr. Martin Luther King when he said, “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.”

The women’s mass action campaign started in one community and spread to over 50 communities across Liberia. We worked daily confronting warlords, meeting with dictators, and refusing to be silenced in the face of AK-47s and RPGs. We walked when we had no transportation, we fasted when water was unaffordable, we held hands in the face of danger, we spoke truth to power when everyone else was being diplomatic, we stood under the rain and the sun with our children to tell the world the stories of the other side of the conflict. Our educational backgrounds, travel experiences, faiths, and social classes did not matter. We had a common agenda: Peace for Liberia Now.

We succeeded when no one thought we would; we were the conscience of the ones who had lost their consciences in their quest for power and political positions. We represented the soul of the nation. No one would have prepared my sisters and me for today — that our struggle would go down in the history of this world. Rather, when confronting warlords, we did so because we felt it was our moral duty to stand as mothers and gird our waist, to fight the demons of war in order to protect the lives of our children, their land, and their future.

This prize could not have come at a better time than this; a time when global and community conversations are about how local community members and unarmed civilians can help turn our upside-down world right-side up. It has come at a time when unarmed citizens— men and women, boys and girls — are challenging dictatorships and ushering in democracy and the sovereignty of people.

Yes! It has come at a time when in many societies where women used to be the silent victims and objects of men’s powers, women are throwing down the walls of repressive traditions with the invincible power of nonviolence. Women are using their bodies, broken from hunger, poverty, desperation, and destitution, to stare down the barrel of the gun. This prize has come at a time when ordinary mothers are no longer begging for peace, but demanding peace, justice, equality, and inclusion in political decision-making.

I must be quick to add that this prize is not just in recognition of the triumph of women. It is a triumph of humanity. To recognize and honor women, the other half of humanity, is to achieve universal wholeness and balance. Like the women I met in Congo over a year ago who said, “Rape and abuse is the result of a larger problem, and that problem is the absence of women in the decision-making space.” If women were part of decision-making in most societies, there would be less exclusive policies and laws that are blind to the abuses women endure.

In conclusion, let me again congratulate the Nobel committee for awarding the Peace Prize to us three women. By this act you affirm that women’s rights are truly human rights and that any leader, nation, or political group that excludes women from all forms of national and local engagement is setting themselves up for failure.

Let this recognition serve as a renewed compact between women and world leaders that commitments made to women through various UN and other global institutions’ resolutions will be pursued with greater commitment and vigilance; let this be a renewed compact that the integrity of a woman’s body and the sanctity of women’s lives will not be subsumed under male-invented traditions.

To women of Liberia and sisterhood across West Africa who continue to band together to respond to crisis in our subregion; to women in Asia, the Middle East, and the world: As we celebrate our achievement through this recognition, let us remind ourselves that victory is still afar. We must continue to unite in sisterhood to turn our tears into triumph, our despair into determination, and our fear into fortitude. There is no time to rest until our world achieves wholeness and balance, where all men and women are considered equal and free.

Leymah Gbowee, a trustee of Carnegie Corporation of New York and the founder and current president of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, is a women’s rights advocate, Liberian peace activist, and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Her foundation provides educational and leadership opportunities to girls, women, and youth to empower the next generation of peacebuilders and democratic leaders in West Africa.