Women, Peace And Security Research Articles

What if Women Ran the World Would it be a Better Place?: International Law as Gender Performance

We increasingly hear that empowering women and placing them in positions of leadership will lead to a safer, more prosperous world. The UN Security Council’s groundbreaking resolutions on Women Peace, and Security (WPS) — and U.S. law implementing these commitments — rest on the assumption that women’s participation in peace and security matters will lead to more sustainable peace, because women presumably “perform” in ways that reduce conflict, violence, and extremism. This idea is of heightened importance today because women are still vastly underrepresented in positions of leadership in the peace and security field, having yet to “shatter that highest and hardest glass ceiling” as Commander-in-Chief in the United States or rise to the role of Secretary-General in the United Nations. Before her own historic race to become the first woman Commander in Chief, Hillary Clinton had prominently made the claim we increasingly hear that women’s empowerment is not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do for global and economic security. Such claims raise fundamental questions for international law, equality theory, and feminism. Assertions that the world would be a better — more peaceful, more prosperous — place, if women assumed leadership positions in peace and security matters are unapologetically instrumentalist and reinforce essentialist views of women. At the same time, evidence suggests that these claims are to some extent accurate. Thus, these assertions should be carefully examined. Reviewing new research, this Article argues that while some evidence supports these claims, the statistical evidence supporting these claims suffers from methodological flaws. Moreover, the forms of gender performance reflected in the data — which international law has organized itself around — are based on the socially constructed roles women play as caregivers, nurturers, and collaborators, not necessarily on their inherent biological roles. Yet, international law reifies these roles and the stereotypes that surround them, even as it tries to open up opportunities for women beyond traditional sex-segregated positions that have long relegated women around the world to the pink ghetto of economic inequality and inferior political and social status. Having to maneuver around formal equality, on the one hand, and instrumentalist claims that women will “save” the world, on the other, means that the category of “woman” can restrict even as it liberates. After all, not all women are “peace-loving,” particularly in a world where the women who succeed are often those who can succeed on terms defined by men.Two prevailing theoretical frameworks — antisubordination and securitization—shape the current debate about WPS, but each ultimately falls short. This Article identifies democratic legitimacy as a novel third approach missing from the existing debate. As an alternative view, the democratic legitimacy account effectively reframes the WPS debate as one concerning inclusive security — emphasizing that women’s participation enhances the representativeness, democracy, and fairness of the process as a whole — rather than privileging the “special interests” of a particular group (as the antisubordination approach is accused of doing) or reinforcing gender essentialism (as the securitization approach does). Notably, a democratic legitimation paradigm is grounded in a model of inclusion that can be applied to vectors of inequality beyond gender, as well as to inequality at the intersection of various forms of inequality. Moreover, by emphasizing democratic representation, this approach insists on local ownership and bottom-up solutions, thereby emphasizing participation and leadership by women in conflict zones, rather than female global elites. Under a democratic legitimacy paradigm, women can still “save” the world, but in a different way than the predominant discourse would have us believe.

Women, peace and security in Africa

This article highlights and critiques the underlying conceptualisations and assumptions of the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda that emerged with the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000. The main argument is that we need to rethink the WPS agenda to produce more holistic and groundbreaking responses for the types of challenges encountered, i.e., that gender inequality and insecurity are deep rooted and multi-layered, and thus negate mechanistic responses that do not deal with cultural and structural issues. It specifically focuses on gender and peace-making and gender and peacekeeping to point to the pitfalls in the current conceptions and practices in this arena.

Translating UNSCR 1325 from the global to the national: protection, representation and participation in the National Action Plans of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda

A decade and a half after the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, gendered peace gaps in post-conflict societies are still wide and deep. This raises pressing questions concerning how UNSCR 1325 and concomitant resolutions on women, peace and security (WPS) constitute women and gender, and how they as particular discursive configurations impact on post-conflict societies. In this article we zoom in on the role of National Action Plans (NAPs) for the implementation of 1325 in national contexts. We undertake a discursive analysis of Bosnia-Herzegovina's and Rwanda's NAPs in order to trace how the 1325 agenda of protection, representation and participation is translated into national contexts. We conclude that the NAPs to a large degree perpetuate the status quo and are not used as instruments for greater societal transformation that support women's authentic participation. The article ends with a reflection on how to imagine agency beyond the scripted protection, representation and participation that the NAPs (re)produce and we suggest a possible role for the latest WPS resolution UNSCR 2122 as a vehicle for transformation.

Gender Sensitive and Transformative Reparations in Bosnia

On June 24, for the first time in the history of the Bosnian War Crimes Court, judges included compensation to a wartime rape victim as part of the Court’s ruling. Bosiljko Markovic and Ostoja Markovic were ordered to pay roughly $15,000 to the woman they raped during the war. The Court also sentenced each man to ten years in prison. The following Monday, June 29, the Court sentenced former soldier Slavko Savic to eight years in prison for raping a civilian during the war, and ordered him to pay roughly $16,500 to the survivor. Such reparations orders for survivors of wartime rape are a huge step forward in the transitional justice process following the 1992-95 Bosnian war. It is estimated that 35,000 women were raped during the conflict. Until now, Bosnian courts have encouraged victims to file claims for compensation in civil proceedings — which can be prohibitively expensive and also requires survivors to reveal their identities. Now that the War Crimes Court is willing to include reparations orders as part of its ruling, it is expected that many more women will come forward. Given the anticipated spike in reparations claims, the Court should bear in mind the international community’s consensus that effective reparations should be gender-sensitive, transformative and participatory as it proceeds in its important work. This paper traces the trajectory of reparations in the context of the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda, examines the importance of transformative and participatory reparations under this framework, and concludes with recommendations for the Bosnian War Crimes Court as it seeks to provide redress for wartime rape survivors.

Gendering the Rwanda Defence Force: A Critical Assessment

Over the past five years the Government of Rwanda has placed renewed emphasis on increasing the number of female military personnel and gender mainstreaming the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF). This article examines the efforts made by the RDF since 2007 to meet these strategic requirements and integrate women into the national security organ. It is suggested that, in spite of Rwanda's success in bringing women into the political sphere, women are still reluctant to join the military. It is argued that prevailing societal values and attitudes, conflicting narratives within official discourse about the role of women as security actors, resource constraints and the RDF's emphasis on ‘gender equality’ are barriers to achieving RDF goals. Drawing on in-depth interviews with RDF military personnel and government officials, as well as documentary research, the article first provides an overview of the Rwandan government's approach to mobilizing women to securitize the state, before examining how the RDF aims to progress the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda nationally and within local communities. The article then reflects on some of the factors that are hindering the recruitment and retention of female military personnel.

Bridging the gap: Early warning, gender and the responsibility to protect

Women, Peace and Security (WPS) scholars and practitioners have expressed reservations about the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle because of its popular use as a synonym for armed humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, R2P’s early failure to engage with and advance WPS efforts such as United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1325 (2000) has seen the perpetuation of limited roles ascribed to women in implementing the R2P principle. As a result, there has been a knowledge and practice gap between the R2P and WPS agendas, despite the fact that their advocates share common goals in relation to the prevention of atrocities and protection of populations. In this article we propose to examine just one of the potential avenues for aligning the WPS agenda and R2P principle in a way that is beneficial to both and strengthens the pursuit of a shared goal – prevention. We argue that the development and inclusion of gender-specific indicators – particularly economic, social and political discriminatory practices against women – has the potential to improve the capacity of early warning frameworks to forecast future mass atrocities.

Localising the Australian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security: a matter of justice

In the bid for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations (UN) Security Council, the Australian government emphasised international peace and security and Indigenous peoples as two of the eight key elements supporting its nomination. Australia's positive track record in support of the UN Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, including the delivery of an Australian National Action Plan (NAP) along with recognition of historical injustices to Indigenous Australians, was highlighted as a valid and important argument in favour of its nomination. The Australian NAP, however, has all but ignored the local context in its development and application, focusing instead on its commitments abroad. This framing of the Australian NAP is informed, firstly, by the WPS agenda policy framework applying to conflict and post-conflict situations, and, secondly, by its location within the UN mandate, requiring those situations to be internationally recognised. This article applies Nancy Fraser's tripartite justice framework to reveal that the Australian NAP gives rise to the political injustice of ‘misrepresentation’ in relation to intra-state (violent), domestically situated Indigenous–settler relations, which are denied the status of ongoing internationally recognised conflict. The author suggests that the remedy to this injustice is to reframe and recognise the conflict status of Indigenous–settler relations in the localisation of the Australian NAP. This localisation creates openings for Indigenous Australian women to engage with the WPS agenda in meaningful ways.