Nina Potarska

Nina Potarska is National Coordinator in Ukraine for the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom (@WILPF), a position she has held since 2016.

Among the organization’s objectives are ensuring that gender perspectives and responses are mainstreamed within national and international structures. A focus is on identifying human rights violations based on gender analysis, government responses to these issues, ways to approach transitional justice and developing strategies for implementation.

As part of her activities, Nina monitors the needs and observance of the rights of women living near the contact line of conflict in eastern Ukraine, gender-based violence, and conflict-related violence. She works on gender-inclusive mediation of conflicts and preparation of reports on the observance of women’s rights in the UN system.

She has been Director of the Center for Social and Labor Studies since 2013 and since 2015 has been studying topics related to the conflict in eastern Ukraine, collecting narratives and conducting research on both sides of the contact line.

For more than 10 years, she has been an activist of the feminist movement, co-coordinator of the Women’s March in Ukraine, and an expert on WPS (Women Peace and Security). She develops and conducts seminars on women’s leadership, women’s activism, civil campaign planning and basic tools for protecting women’s rights.