Milena is a feminist justice and peace activist and consultant. She has been engaged with social justice activism and study spanning themes from violence against women, queer and LGBTI resistance, and the struggle against war and militarisation.
She has ten years of work experience within civil society organisations with programmes relating to gender, peace-building, and cross-border dialogue. She has worked for organisation such as UN Women, Academy for Peace and Development, and the The Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation. She is the founder of the feminist trust and solidarity building initiative Beyond Borders: Linking Our Stories with Turkish, Kurdish, and Armenian women. This project aims to establish a dialogue and cooperation between Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish women, to build solidarity among women across the closed Turkish-Armenian border and to develop an innovative approach to peacebuilding by collecting a number of interviews by and from women in both countries, which will then be turned into a performance and book for larger audiences.
Milena has a bachelor's in Women and Gender Studies from City University of New York, Hunter College and a master's in Peace and Conflict Research from Uppsala University where she was a Rotary Peace Fellow from 2013-2015.
I am motivated by a desire to see people living freer lives - free from worry about how to feed their families and pay back their bank loans, free from violation by police if they exercise their right to protest, free from poor health as a result of environmental pollution or the stress of living in highly militarised contexts, free from living under corrupt regimes that privatise public goods, and free from war propaganda that dehumanises others and justifies proliferation of weapons and war.Milena Abrahamyan