Armed Conflict, Women and Climate Change

Jody M. Prescott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138205321
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315467191
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The gender-differentiated and more severe impacts of armed conflict upon women and girls are well recognised by the international community, as demonstrated by UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and subsequent resolutions. Similarly, the development community has identified gender-differentiated impacts upon women and girls as a result of the effects of climate change. Current research and analysis has reached no consensus as to any causal relationship between climate change and armed conflict, but certain studies suggest an indirect linkage between climate change effects such as food insecurity and armed conflict.

Little research has been conducted on the possible compounding effects that armed conflict and climate change might have on at-risk population groups such as women and girls. Armed Conflict, Women and Climate Change explores the intersection of these three areas and allows the reader to better understand how military organisations across the world need to be sensitive to these relationships to be most effective in civilian-centric operations in situations of humanitarian relief, peacekeeping and even armed conflict. This book examines strategy and military doctrine from NATO, the UK, US and Australia, and explores key issues such as displacement, food and energy insecurity, and male out-migration as well as current efforts to incorporate gender considerations in military activities and operations.

This innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, international development, international security, sustainability, gender studies and law.

1
Armed conflict and gender

Beginning with UNSCR 1325 on women, peace and security, the last two decades have witnessed a sustained and growing world-wide effort to establish a normative platform upon which to base national and international policies and initiatives to achieve greater protection of women and girls in situations involving armed conflict. UNSCR 1325 has been amplified by a number of additional UN Security Council resolutions, which for the most part have focused on measures to address sexual and gender-based violence against civilians, and particularly against women and girls. Examples include UNSCR 1820, noting the need to prevent sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflict (UN, 2008), and UNSCR 1960 (UN, 2010), which defined institutional tools for combatting impunity of perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence, and setting out steps to prevent violence and to protect women from it.

To implement the requirements of UNSCR 1325, nations have been encouraged to develop their own national action plans (UN Security Council, 2005: 2–13). As of July 2018, 74 countries had established their own plans. Some of these plans are very recent, such as Mozambique’s, which was established in June 2018 (PeaceWomen, 2018). Other countries, however, began establishing their national action plans shortly after UNSCR 1325 was promulgated. The UK, for example, was already working under its fourth national action plan in 2018, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, ‘UK strategy, doctrine and gender’. Before exploring the gendered effects of armed conflict that UNSCR 1325 was intended to address, it is important to note that neither the resolution itself nor the international and national efforts to implement its goals and principles are without blemish or critics. To best assess the impact of UNSCR 1325, it is therefore useful to first briefly review the general context of armed conflict with regard to women and girls today, and to specifically examine what textual language the UN Security Council agreed to when it passed UNSCR 1325.

War’s impacts and UNSCR 1325’s main provisions

In general, armed conflict today tends to happen more often in areas which are less economically developed. Martin (2009) estimates that between 70 and 75 percent of people dislocated by war as either refugees or displaced persons are women and their minor children, and that children account for about 50 percent of all refugees (1). Kim and Conceição (2010) estimate that between 1990 and 2005, over 3 million people died in armed conflicts occurring in developing countries (31–38). Women in these areas are more likely to have a relatively inferior social and economic status as compared to men, and this gender discrimination and its effects make women more at risk to the impacts of armed conflict (Gardam and Jarvis, 2001: 8–9). These negative effects occur irrespective of whether women are in the roles of civilians caught up in the fighting, refugees or even combatants (Prescott, 2013: 87–90).

With this general picture in mind, it is now useful to examine what the UN Security Council committed to in approving UNSCR 1325 (UN, 2000). In its Preamble, the resolution set out four main conditions that needed to be accomplished to achieve greater protection for women and girls. First, there needed to be ‘equal participation and full involvement’ by women ‘in all efforts for the maintenance of peace and security’, particularly with regard to decision-making. Second, gender perspectives needed to be ‘mainstreamed’ into peacekeeping operations. Third, specialised training needed to be developed ‘for all peacekeeping personnel on the protection, special needs and human rights of women and children in conflict situations’. Fourth, and as noted earlier in the Introduction, the UN Security Council recognised the need ‘to implement fully international humanitarian and human rights law that protects the rights of women and girls during and after conflict’.

‘Full’ implementation of IHL and international human rights law does not mean implementation of only those areas that IHL and international human rights law have in common, such as their respective prohibitions of sexual and gender-based violence. This is not what the resolution states. In this sense, the significant number of UN Security Council resolutions subsequent to UNSCR 1325 that focus on sexual and gender-based violence are undoubtedly necessary and beneficial, but they might have obscured the full scope of UNSCR 1325’s requirements (Prescott, 2013: 103–04). The potential implications of ‘full’ implementation to the other areas of IHL such as the use of force in kinetic engagements must be explored to comply with the resolution’s requirements. Although other criticisms of UNSCR 1325 or efforts to implement it are not so focused on IHL and are therefore largely outside the scope of this book, they are worth briefly reviewing to better understand the interests and positions of other stakeholders in the resolution’s implementation at the national and international levels.

Critique of UNSCR 1325

Some of the criticisms of UNSCR 1325 and national implementation efforts are political or philosophical, but others are more directly tied to operational concerns. For example, some argue that the steps taken by different nations under their national action plans to incorporate gender perspectives in their military activities and operations are inconsistent with the intent of the drafters of the resolution. The drafters’ intent, these writers argue, was to eliminate war, not to ‘make war safe for women’, and the ‘militarisation’ of UNSCR 1325 is therefore counterproductive to achieving the resolution’s goals (Weiss, 2011; Shepherd, 2016: 332–33). Whilst this was undoubtedly part of the historical context of the resolution’s creation, the subjective intent of civil society actors cannot control the meaning of its plain text as approved by the UN Security Council. ‘Full’ implementation of IHL suggests that the council recognised that it would still be quite some time before war became safe for women.

Winslow (2009) notes that certain feminists are critical of UNSCR 1325’s failure to address root problems because of its focus upon women and girls, rather than identifying the relationship between masculine identities during armed conflict and violent behaviour patterns that are accepted during those times because they are seen as ‘male’ (534). This criticism could be operationally relevant, although perhaps not in the way these writers were thinking. For example, some studies have attributed armed conflict between different pastoral peoples in Kenya to the impact of climate change (Pearson, 2017: 2–3). Other studies of conflict between two of these peoples, the Turkana and the Pokot, suggest instead that one significant component of the raiding of each other’s cattle are sets of ‘masculinities’ – young men striving to meet societal expectations of masculine strength and to fulfil the traditional male role of providing these valuable assets and food for their families (Schilling, Froese and Naujoks, 2018: 181).

Winslow (2009) notes as well that others have criticised UNSCR 1325 because it does not include ethnicity or class relations (543). This omission might also have operational consequences. One review of the UN mission in Eritrea and Ethiopia suggests that UN women soldiers from Ghana and Kenya interacted better with local women than did their ethnic European counterparts (Valenius, 2007: 36). Finally, in the wake of revelations of widespread sexual abuse against women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo by UN peacekeeping troops shortly after the passage of UNSCR 1325 (UN Secretary General, 2005), the UN’s commitment to UNSCR 1325 was seriously questioned. Although there have been subsequent cases of similar misconduct by UN troops (Oladipo, 2017) and the UN has been criticised for the handling of these cases as well (Anderlini, 2017), it is important to note that the UN has undertaken important steps to help educate and train personnel regarding their responsibilities to protect women and children, a number of which will be discussed in Chapter 9, ‘Gender in military activities and operations’. With these criticisms in mind, let’s now turn to the more specific ways in which women and girls are impacted by armed conflict.

Women and girls in armed conflict

Impacts on women and girls as civilians caught up in the fighting

There has been significant progress in recent years, but historically analyses and reports on armed conflicts’ effects on civilians have not tended to differentiate experiences of civilians based on their gender. Indeed, Gardam and Charlesworth (2000) note that the particular concerns of women have been marginalised in such assessments (150). Although women’s and girls’ gender-differentiated experiences of war occur within specific contexts, it is useful first to assess the general conditions under which many women in the world live today. In terms of relative affluence, women constitute the majority of the more than one billion people who live in poverty. Because of their traditional family roles in many cultures, women are generally less mobile than men, less likely to be employed outside the home (Gardam and Jarvis, 2001: 8–9), and generally less educated (Gardam and Charlesworth, 2000: 151, 153). Armed conflict tends to exacerbate these factors to the further detriment of women. Importantly, however, these descriptions are general – they do not apply everywhere all the time, and care must be taken in any specific operational gender analysis to determine whether and how they do.

Although modern armed conflicts involve women as military leaders (Davis, 2010; Biank, 2014) and combatants (Wright, 2011; Lemmon, 2015), the majority of women who are impacted by armed conflict are in fact civilians (Gardam and Charlesworth, 2000: 152), and they ordinarily do not have much control over the manner in which war affects them. In terms of physical insecurity, Jones (2010) notes that women are very often victims of rape, sexual assault, virtual enslavement and torture during the course and often in the aftermath of armed conflict (19–20, 58, 84, 101, 134–35, 143, 150–51, 161–62, 172). As described by Valenius (2007), other forms of sexual violence against women in these circumstances include ‘forced prostitution, … forced impregnation, forced maternity, forced termination of pregnancy, forced sterilisation, … strip searches and inappropriate medical examinations’ (20).

The brutal sexual assaults that occur during the course of armed conflict can have serious and long-lasting negative health effects for victimised women and girls. One study of rape survivors from the Democratic Republic of Congo (Leaning, Bartels and Mowafi, 2009) noted that 85 percent of the women reported vaginal discharge afterwards, and that 10 percent reported having been impregnated. Particularly serious were the large number of women who reported symptoms consistent with having suffered fistulas (tears in their vaginal, urinary and anal tracts causing unnatural connections between the two) after their rapes – 41 percent reported discharging urine or faeces from the vagina. And 77 percent of these women also reported experiencing insomnia and nightmares, and 91 percent reported suffering from feelings of shame and fear (188).

The ripple effects of these injuries upon women degrade their levels of social and economic security, as well as those of their children ( Jones, 2010: 58, 161–62). Dharmapuri (2011) explains that rape and sexual violence against women can destabilise the economic productivity of communities, because they are unable to safely leave their homes and villages to go the fields to tend their crops, or to markets to sell and obtain food. This diminishes their ability to feed their families and earn currency (64). Women and girls can also find themselves at higher risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, because they are at greater risk of sexual violence in the lawless and chaotic situations that often arise in humanitarian disaster and armed conflict situations, and might even need to trade sex for food and other essential supplies (Decker et al., 2009: 72).

Further, Gardam and Jarvis (2001) observe that ‘Armed conflict is invariably accompanied by the disintegration of societal structures, which will leave women more disadvantaged because of their inferior position than men’ (20). Because women in general have access to fewer economic resources to begin with in many societies, they are both less able to resist the hardships caused by armed conflict and less likely to have the resilience to rebuild after the conflict has ended. In addition, women may be dependent upon the men of their families to earn a living, and armed conflict will often take men away from their homes and livelihoods as either combatants or refugees (Gardam and Charlesworth, 2000: 151–53). In terms of the gender-differentiated impact of armed conflict, Buscher (2009) notes that in non-international armed conflicts, whilst young men find themselves forming a recruiting pool for combatant groups, often because of their limited economic choices, young women and girls will often find themselves dropping out of school to take on chores additional to their ordinary tasks such as drawing water, collecting biomass for energy and caring for family members (88).

Women and teenaged girls therefore often become the providers and protectors for their families, in addition to the time-consuming domestic duties they already perform (Gardam and Charlesworth, 2000: 153; Valenius, 2007: 23). Coupled with their often lower levels of education and training, these great responsibilities are not matched by opportunities for women and girls to obtain meaningful and remunerative work. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR; 2008) finds this is particularly the case with the diversion of resources that occurs in conflict situations that might otherwise be used for capacity-building purposes (306–10), and Gardam and Jarvis (2001) note that it occurs as well in the generally austere conditions that characterise post-conflict situations (40).

Unfortunately, women civilians experience armed conflict’s negative effects even if they are not caught up directly in the fighting. Buscher (2009) details how armed conflict disrupts livelihoods, by decreasing access to markets and financial assets, reducing access to land for growing crops or herding animals, and damaging vital infrastructure (89). The insecurity caused by armed conflict often restricts women’s freedom of movement, often forcing them to lose their livelihoods (88–89). In addition, because women in these conflict zones are not likely to be able to equitably access economic resources even during times of relative peace, their resilience to withstand the hardships caused by armed conflict or to rebuild quickly once the fighting is done might be severely impaired (Gardam and Charlesworth, 2000: 151, 153).

Impacts on women and girls as refugees

Refugees in general are ‘exposed to foreign – and often inadequate – living conditions, and consequently tend to be more prone to accidents, injuries and disease’ (Gardam and Charlesworth, 2011: 124). The risks of such events, however, are greater for women than they are for men. Women who find themselves as refugees from armed conflict must survive under particularly trying circumstances. Refugee camp living conditions are often substandard, and women therefore often lack appropriate hygienic facilities or basic medical care. Shortages of contraceptive supplies mean that women are at risk of increased pregnancy during these times of intense stress (Gardam and Charlesworth, 2011: 125). Refugee camps also present an increased risk of sexual violence to women, but the specialised medical services necessary to treat victims of sexual assault might be in very short supply (UN News Centre, 2011).

This is not to say that sexual assault and its effects are suffered only by female refugees. Storr (2011) points out that men are likewise subject to sexual violence, and they too are at greater risk of its occurrence when they are uprooted from their homes during armed conflict. Sexual violence against men tends to be underreported, notes Valenius (2007), and reported by victims as ‘torture’ rather than sexual assault because of masculinity concerns and cultural taboos in different societies (18). For these reasons, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (2012) has drawn up a list of indicators to help identify men who have been victims of sexual violence (8–9). The international community has also been paying more attention to this violence experienced by male refugees as a result of war, as demonstrated by the recent UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ report on the sexual abu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Armed conflict and gender
• 2 Gender and climate change
• 3 Climate change and armed conflict
• 4 NATO strategy, doctrine and gender
• 5 UK strategy, doctrine and gender
• 6 US strategy, doctrine and gender
• 7 Australian strategy, doctrine and gender
• 8 International humanitarian law and gender
• 9 Gender in military activities and operations
• Conclusion
• Index