Speaker Information

Panel Discussion 2

Panelist

Ryoko Yonamine

  • Gender specialist on women, peace and security, PhD student at Osaka Jogakuin University

    Ryoko Yonamine is a gender specialist on women, peace and security. She is a PhD student at Osaka Jogakuin University in the International Collaboration and Coexistence in the 21st Century Peace Studies and Human Rights Studies.

    She has more than 25 years of experience on gender issues and women, peace (WPS) and security. Currently, she is doing her PhD research on policy gaps between global WPS context and Japan’s WPS policy.

    She served for the Gender Mainstreaming Division, Foreign Policy Bureau, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan for seven years (till April 2024). She was mainly responsible for Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) and preventing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).

    Prior to joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she worked as a Gender Programme Officer at the Okinawa Women's Foundation (Okinawa Women’s Centre) in Okinawa for three years, and taught Gender Studies as a lecturer at Meio University for five years. She also served as a board member of the Gender Equality Action Plan for Okinawa Prefecture and several municipalities in Okinawa.

    Then she has served as a gender specialist in several organizations and projects since 2008 and has worked gender and WPS projects in Nepal (with a Women’s human rights NGO), Cambodia (with JICA), and Fiji (with UNDP). Between the Nepal and Cambodia projects, she worked as programme advisor and gender instructor for the Secretariat of the International Peace Cooperation Headquarters, Cabinet Office, where she trained the Japan Self Defense Force (JSDF) and UN Peacekeepers for two years (2010-2012). She is one of the key civil society members that drafted Japan’s first national action plan on WPS in 2015.

    She obtained her B.A. in Sociology from Soka University in Tokyo and earned her MS degree in Women, Development, and Administration from University of York in the UK.

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