1. Introduction
1.1. Research Background
understand whether female peacekeepers can actually prevent their male colleagues from committing sexual exploitation and abuse.
1.1. Research Background
The Women, Peace and Security Agenda
Since peacekeeping mission started all the way back in 19484, women have only made up a very small number of the military or police forces that were deployed into conflict regions.
Civilians, in general, are the ones threatened the most by war and conflict, and while women make up a majority of casualties, they have been extremely underrepresented in the actual peace process.5 In the 90s women made up about 1 percent6 of deployed personnel, and around the same time demands for the inclusion of more women in peace operations became louder and were eventually heard in 2000 when the Windhoek Declaration and the Namibia Plan of Action were introduced.7 They called for action to be taken in regards to “the gender balance and gender equality at all levels of peacekeeping missions.”8 Most noticeably, by 2015 a 50/50 representation was to be reached.9
In October of the same year the UN Security Council adopted resolution 1325, which is seen as the “blueprint for gender and peacekeeping work for the Department of Peacekeeping
4 UN Peacekeeping, “Peacekeeping Fact Sheet,” August 31, 2016, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/resources/
statistics/factsheet.shtml (accessed November 17, 2016).
5 According to UN Women, it is estimated that civilians make up to 90 percent of the casualties in war and conflict.
UN Women, “Women and Armed Conflict – Fact Sheet No. 5,” June, 2000,
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/followup/session/presskit/fs5.htm (accessed December 07, 2016).
6 UN Peacekeeping, “Women in Peacekeeping,” 2016, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/issues/women/
womeninpk.shtml (accessed November 17, 2016).
7 Francesco Bertolazzi, Women with a Blue Helmet – The integration of Women and Gender Issues in UN
Peacekeeping Missions (Santo Domingo: UN-INSTRAW, 2010), 8; Olivera Simic, “Does the Presence of Women Really Matter?,” International Peacekeeping, 17 no. 2 (2010): 188.
8 Bertolazzi, “Women with a Blue Helmet,” 8.
9 UN Security Council, S/2000/693 Security Council Report, July 14, 2000, 3; and Bertolazzi, “Women with a Blue Helmet,” 8.
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agreement.”11 The resolution also encourages the UN member states to include more females, and thereby a gender perspective, in peace operations. In the following years the UN Security Council passed another seven resolutions, including United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1820, UNSCR 1888, UNSCR 1889, UNSCR 1960, UNSCR 2106, UNSCR 2122, and UNSCR 2242. These resolutions either reinforce the call for more female participation in peace building or focus on the effects sexual exploitation and abuse have on the overall outcome of the peacekeeping missions.12 UNSCR 1820, which was adopted in June 2008, “explicitly links sexual violence as a tactic of war with women, peace and security issues”13, this resolution thus urges the member states to make sure that their troops are properly trained so they can guard the local population in an adequate manner from sexual violence.14 Resolution 1888 from September 2009, repeats that peacekeeping missions have to handle sexual violence in a proper way, and demands that the Secretary-General “appoint a Special Representative to provide coherent and strategic leadership, […] in order to address […] sexual violence in armed conflict.”15 With the exception of UNSCR 1889, 2122, and 2242, the rest of the resolutions put the main focus on how to protect women from sexual assault and on how to prevent such assaults from occurring.16 Resolutions 1889 and 2122 address women’s participation in the peace building process, with UNSCR 188910 UN Peacekeeping, “Women, Peace and Security,” 2016, http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/issues/women/
wps.shtml (accessed November 17, 2016).
11 Bertolazzi, “Women with a Blue Helmet,” 8.
12 UN Security Council, S/RES/1325, Security Council Resolution, October 31, 2000, 2; Paul Kirby and Laura J.
Shepherd, “The futures past of the Women, Peace and Security agenda,” International Affairs, 2 (2016): 379f;
Bertolazzi, Women with a Blue Helmet, 8f.
13 UN Peacekeeping, “Women, Peace and Security”, 2016.
14 UN Security Council, S/RES/1820, Security Council Resolution, June 19, 2008, 2f.
15 UN Security Council, S/RES/1888, Security Council Resolution, September 30, 2009, 4.
16 For more information on UNSCR 1960 and 2106 see UN Security Council, S/RES/1960, Security Council Resolution, December 16, 2010 and UN Security Council, S/RES/2106, Security Council Resolution, June 24, 2013 respectively.
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stating that the underrepresentation of women is “a result of violence and intimidation, lack of security and lack of rule of law, cultural discrimination and stigmatization, […] and socio-economic factors […]”17. As a consequence, the Secretary-General is asked to present a report, which addresses “women’s participation and inclusion in peacebuilding and planning in the aftermath of conflict”18. The most noticeable thing in resolution 2122 is that the Security Council confronts its own behavior and points out that there is a “need for consistent implementation of resolution 1325 (2000) in its own work”19. The resolution also requested that a High-level Review was to be completed in 2015 in order to find out how the implementation of UNSCR 1325 had progressed. The findings of the review will be presented in the following section titled 15 years after UNSCR 1325 – A Reflection. For now, it should only be said that the review was followed by resolution 2242, which bases its requests on the findings of the Global Study.20
More than 15 years after the first resolution on Women, Peace and Security was released, the UN is still dealing with many reports of their peacekeepers being involved in sexual abuse cases;
and in 2014, women still only made up about 3 percent21 of the military personnel and 10 percent22 of the police personnel in UN peace operations. And even when we use the most recent gender statistics provided by the UN for March this year, the percentage of women participation has not really changed. For military personnel, women make up about 3.5 percent, and for police personnel, it is 9.8 percent.23 It is not clear whether the amount of women in police personnel decreased or if the percentage for 2014 was just rounded in a different way. However, these
17 UN Security Council, S/RES/1889, Security Council Resolution, October 05, 2009, 2.
18 UN Security Council, S/RES/1889, 5.
19 UN Security Council, S/RES/2122, Security Council Resolution, October 18, 2013, 3.
20 UN Security Council, S/RES/2242, Security Council Resolution, October 13, 2015; and UN Security Council, S/RES/2122, 5f.
21 UN Peacekeeping, “Women in Peacekeeping,” 2016.
22 UN Peacekeeping, “Women in Peacekeeping,” 2016.
23 The actual numbers for these percentages are: military personnel 85,811 in total with 2,989 women, and police personnel 11,963 with 1,177 women. The detailed listing of the gender statistics for August 2016 can be found in the Annex under Table 1 on page 85f. UN, “Gender Statistics by Mission,” April 10, 2017,
http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/contributors/gender/2017gender/mar17.pdf (accessed May 01, 2017).
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numbers raise questions about where the Women, Peace and Security agenda is still facing issues and the following section will attempt to provide some answers.
15 years after UNSCR 1325 – A Reflection
In October 2015, the Security Council convened a High-level Review for the 15th anniversary of UNSCR 1325 in order to assess the progress the Women, Peace and Security agenda had made since its initiation. In order for the review to be productive a Global Study was requested under the lead of Radhika Coomaraswamy, the former Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict. He was supported by a 17 member Advisory Group, which in the end presented a study titled Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace. Overall the study has come up with a mostly negative conclusion on the success of implementing UNSCR 1325. The subsequent paragraphs will first look at some of the findings of the Global Study and its recommendations, and then contemplate criticisms of the Women, Peace and Security agenda that have been raised by individual scholars.24
According to the study, one of the main issues the agenda has been facing is that while a clear framework on how to react to and handle sexual assault had been developed, prosecution barely ever happens. In addition, the goal of adding more women to all steps in the peace process is virtually as far away as it was when UNSCR 1325 was adopted. This result that can partly be blamed on the fact that so far only 5425 of the 193 UN member states have created their own National Action Plans, which are intended to drive the inclusion of women in key aspects of the peace process ahead at the national level as well. Some of the countries that have adopted a
24 Torunn L. Tryggestad, “The Women, Peace and Security Agenda – 15 Years On,” Policy Brief, PRIO Centre on Gender, Peace and Security, http://file.prio.no/publication_files/prio/Tryggestad%20-%20The%20Women%
20Peace%20and%20Security%20Agenda,%20GPS%20Policy%20Brief%201-2016.pdf (accessed December 06, 2016).
25 At the point in time the study was conducted only 54 UN member states had adopted National Action Plans, since then, however, the number has risen to 63. Tryggestad, “The Women, Peace and Security Agenda,” 3.
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National Action Plan include Norway, South Sudan, and the United States.26 The Advisory Group also found that the agenda lacks funding and that extremism should be made one of the central security issues of the agenda since women are once again the ones that are especially threatened.27
Recommendation wise, the study suggests that on all levels conflict prevention needs to be taken more seriously and should be linked to gender equality. It has been proposed that a Working Group for the Security Council should be created in order to make “information available on country-specific gender issues when the Security Council […] discusses and adopts mandates for new peace operations.”28 Torunn Tryggestad, Director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo on Gender, Peace and Security, points out that critics believe that getting efficient results from such a group might be difficult, and she herself mentions that funding such a project could be an issue as well. On the topic of lacking funds, the study recommends to reserving a specific portion of available funds for the Women, Peace and Security agenda, which, when needed, can be easily distributed. In order to push forward with the main gender initiative, it is suggested that senior gender advisors should be hired in support of the individual Special Envoys the Secretary-General appoints. According to Tryggestad, the UN member countries seem opposed to creating the position of an Assistant Secretary-General for Women, Peace and Security. Many of these recommendations are forming the base for UNSCR 2242.29
Other scholars such as Paul Kirby and Laura Shepherd point out that the Women, Peace and Security agenda is somewhat lopsided towards the prevention and protection of women from
26 A list of all countries that have adopted a National Action Plan for the Women, Peace and Security agenda can be found in the Annex under Table 3 on page 87f. Peace Women, “Member States,” 2016.
27 Tryggestad, “The Women, Peace and Security Agenda.”
28 Tryggestad, “The Women, Peace and Security Agenda,” 3.
29 For all recommendations made by the Global Study see: Radhika Coomaraswamy, “Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace,” Global Study, UN Women, http://www2.unwomen.org/-/media/files/un%20women/wps/highlights/unw-global-study-1325-2015.pdf?v=1&d=20160323T192435 (accessed December 06, 2016). Tryggestad, “The Women, Peace and Security Agenda.”
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sexual violence, but the participation of women in the peace process is playing a subordinate role.
A emphasis on protection and prevention bears the danger of taking away any kind of agenda women have, thus portraying them only as victims that need to be saved.30 Gina Heathcote agrees with this sentiment and writes that the wording of most of the Women, Peace and Security resolutions is problematic, as it strengthens negative gender stereotypes.31 Besides criticizing that
“third-world female vulnerability […] becomes the justification for increased first-world women’s participation”32, Heathcote also takes issue with the fact that “there is no reference to men as a gendered group.”33 She mentions that with later resolutions such as UNSCR 1898 and 2122, the Security Council seems aware that previous Women, Peace and Security resolutions had issues with gender essentialism, but in order to completely move away from that way of thinking the Security Council must acquire a better understanding of women living in conflict situations. As briefly mentioned, a main issue for the UN is that the responsibility to deploy women lies with the member states, and as long as they are not planning to establish National Action Plans on the topic gender equality in peace building, the UN can do nothing besides encouraging and advocating such plans. Kirby and Shepherd suggest the establishment of regional actions plans and localization programs in addition to National Action Plans in order to further the Women, Peace and Security agenda.34 This section by no means is a whole reflection of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, as that, as we can see in the Global Study, would exceed the limits of this thesis.
30 Kirby and Shepherd, “The futures past of the Women, Peace and Security agenda,” International Affairs, 380.
31 Gina Heathcote, “Participation, Gender and Security,” in Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security, ed. Gina Heathcote and Dianne Otto (USA/UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 50.
32 Heathcote, “Participation, Gender and Security,” 54.
33 Heathcote, “Participation, Gender and Security,” 57.
34 Heathcote, “Participation, Gender and Security,” 54ff; and Kirby and Shepherd, “The futures past of the Women, Peace and Security agenda,” International Affairs, 383ff.
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