Peace operations pre-2000: the pitfalls of gender blindness
There are several ways in which peace operations pre-1325 failed to advance feminist visions of peace and security. All could be said to stem from a failure of analysis â that is, a failure to understand the gendered nature of war. Peace operations were blind to the way that war impacts on men and women differently, the way that it is experienced differently by men and women, and, finally, the way that gender as a relational power dynamic underpins and sustains the war system. This section briefly elaborates on these three elements of the gendered nature of war, before discussing the interÂrelated ways in which the failure of the UN and other actors to engage with this reality prevented peace operations from responding effectively to violent conflicts.
Until the passage of 1325 in 2000, gender-disaggregated data on war were almost non-existent, so it is hard to be certain about the extent to which war impacted on men and women differently in terms of suffering death and injury. Nonetheless, feminists have systematically exposed the myth that women were safe on some âhome frontâ whilst men alone were bravely facing death on the battlefield (Meintjes et al. 2001; Moser and Clark 2001; Turshen and Twagiramariya 2001; Giles and Hyndman 2004; Mazurana et al. 2005). Women have always been at risk in war: as civilians and refugees, perhaps increasingly so in ânew warsâ, wherein civilians are often directly targeted (Kaldor 2012); and as combatants, a position women have held in almost every war in history (Jones 1997; Kennedy-Pipe 2000; Turshen and Twagiramariya 2001). Recent studies of the available data on gender-disaggregated deaths in war concludes that men are more likely to die during conflict, whereas women die more often of indirect causes after the conflict is over (PlĂźmper et al. 2006; Ormhaug et al. 2009), reinforcing Joshua Goldstein's finding that âboth genders lose in war, although they lose in somewhat different waysâ (Goldstein 2001: 402).
Some threats seem to affect women disproportionately, such as conflict-related sexual violence. In Rwanda, between 100,000 and 250,000 women were raped during the three months of genocide in 1994, and UN agencies estimate that more than 60,000 women were raped during the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991â2002), more than 40,000 in Liberia (1989â2003), up to 60,000 in the former Yugoslavia (1992â5) and at least 200,000 in the DRC since 1998 (UN 2014a). Rape can result in unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections and stigmatization. Meeting the needs of survivors â including medical care, HIV treatment, psychological support, economic assistance and legal redress â is extraordinarily challenging in wartime. Refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are particularly at risk. It is thought that the number of women suffering from some form of sexual violence rose to over 80 per cent in camps for refugees and IDPs resulting from the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Goetz and Anderson 2008: 2). Sexual violence against men and boys is increasingly acknowledged also to have been a feature of many conflicts. In this related form of gender-based violence, predominantly male perpetrators target men and boys of the opposing side as a means of humiliating them through violent subordination and emasculation (Allison 2007; Sivakumaran 2010). Here we see the intersection of race, ethnicity and sexuality with gender, as powerful structures which are drawn upon and reinforced in war.
As well as direct physical violence, âstructural violenceâ, peace scholar Johan Galtung's (1969) term for the denial of basic needs, is an important aspect of war's gendered impacts. Wars cause and exacerbate poverty and inequality through the destruction of livelihoods, infrastructure and communities. Research into the political economy of war zones has identified three overlapping and interrelated economies (Pugh et al. 2004), in which women are rarely the main profit-makers or power-holders (Peterson 2008; Chinkin and Kaldor 2013).2 Combat economies emerge in war to directly supply and fund fighters and insurgent activities. They are dominated by armed groups and their political supporters and thus predominantly (though not wholly) by men. Soldiers loot, kidnap, smuggle, manipulate aid and expropriate natural resources in order to raise the money to fund their battles. Closely related criminal economies emerge that directly and indirectly supply and fund conflict activities. Here, the agents are primarily motivated by profit-seeking, opportunities which are enhanced in conflict zones as regulatory mechanisms break down, and centralized control is weakened by war, political divisions and/or extensive corruption. The key agents involved are both men and women, but mostly the former. They include petty criminals, conflict entrepreneurs, war profiteers, traffickers, money launderers and those who produce and/or transport trafficked goods. Women are involved, in part, because this economy overlaps with the coping economy as individuals and households pursue illicit activities as an often unavoidable survival strategy. The coping economy encompasses people trying to meet their survival needs in conflict conditions where social stability and traditional livelihoods have been disrupted. It is primarily women who are assigned, and assume, responsibility for sustaining families, households and even neighbourhoods. Moreover, the increase in female-headed households in post-conflict contexts exacerbates the pressures on women to generate coping strategies. Such strategies thus rely increasingly on informal and often illicit activities, including dealing in black market goods; selling organs for transplant; engaging in sex work and debt bondage; and participating in potentially lucrative but high-risk criminal activities (Peterson 2008; also see Justino et al. 2012; Chinkin and Kaldor 2013; Raven-Roberts 2013).
Their participation in these war economies demonstrates that women cannot be thought of only as victims in war; they are actively involved in negotiating survival within and often for their communities. Indeed, women are also often to be found working to facilitate peace and reconciliation at the grassroots (Cockburn 1998; Anderlini 2007; Porter 2007). Women can be victims, perpetrators, survivors and peacebuilders, and these roles are not mutually exclusive (NĂ AolĂĄin et al. 2011: 45). Nonetheless, it is important to note war's devastating impacts on women, particularly women of marginalized races, ethnicities and sexualities, and poor women â in terms of both direct physical violence and indirect structural violence. Indeed, the two are connected with feminist scholars demonstrating how social and economic inequalities increase the likelihood of physical violence, including sexual violence in conflict (True 2012).
This understanding of the links between physical and structural violence links to the second point, which is that war tends to be experienced in different ways by women and men. For women, particularly marginalized women, violence may not cease even when there is an end to the fighting between combatants in public spaces. Evidence from post-war situations in every corner of the globe indicates that women face both a continuation of the aggression endured during the war and new forms of violence (Cockburn and Zarkov 2002a; Rehn and Johnson Sirleaf 2002; C. Cohn 2013). Rape continues after war, perpetrated by former combatants and state security forces, who can be both strangers and/or partners (Rehn and Johnson Sirleaf 2002; Pankhurst 2007, 2008). There is also evidence to suggest that domestic violence increases (Sørensen 1998; Meintjes et al. 2001; Rehn and Johnson Sirleaf 2002; Pankhurst 2007). Studies in Cambodia in the mid-1990s indicated that as many as 75 per cent of women were victims of domestic violence, often at the hands of men who had kept the small arms and light weapons they used during the war (Rehn and Johnson Sirleaf 2002: 15). In the coping economy, women are often forced to sell sex for survival (Pankhurst 2007; True 2012). In sum, there is much evidence to suggest that âwhile the guns are silent, or the machetes temporarily laid aside, cultural, domestic and structural violence remainâ (VlachovĂĄ and Biason 2005). Again, the way war is experienced differently for women is not just in terms of direct violence, but also due to the roles women often have as primary carers for the old, the young and the vulnerable. As Christine Chinkin notes, while âthe forms and locations of gendered violence change at the cessation of active conflict, women's relations with war-traumatized children, family members or fighters will placed gendered demands on themâ (Chinkin 2003a: 11). For Chinkin, âpost-conflictâ is a misnomer: war is rarely over for women in the âpost-conflictâ phase.
Feminists have also drawn attention to the role of gender in driving and sustaining war. There is a mutually reinforcing relationship between militarism, an ideology which legitimizes violent solutions to conflict and disorder, and patriarchy, an ideology which legitimizes the domination of men over women (Enloe 1993; Cockburn 2007, 2010). Militarism relies on the acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity and femininity in order to make militarized responses to conflict appear legitimate, normal or even inevitable. These ideas position men and militaries as endowed with strength, rationality and the ability to use force, and position women and femininities as vulnerable, in need of protection. The gender ideology underpinning war relies on complementary femininities, that is, those that endorse hegemonic masculinity and that assume passivity, vulnerability and irrationality to be an essential part of what it is to be a woman. In this gender order, it appears natural or inevitable that the response to disagreements should be to empower the âJust Warriorsâ â ...
