The Gender and Security Agenda

Strategies for the 21st Century

Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, Michael E. Brown, Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, Michael E. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000073959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the gender dimensions of a wide array of national and international security challenges.

The volume examines gender dynamics in ten issue areas in both the traditional and human security sub-fields: armed conflict, post-conflict, terrorism, military organizations, movement of people, development, environment, humanitarian emergencies, human rights, governance. The contributions show how gender affects security and how security problems affect gender issues.

Each chapter also examines a common set of key factors across the issue areas: obstacles to progress, drivers of progress and long-term strategies for progress in the 21st century. The volume develops key scholarship on the gender dimensions of security challenges and thereby provides a foundation for improved strategies and policy directions going forward. The lesson to be drawn from this study is clear: if scholars, policymakers and citizens care about these issues, then they need to think about both security and gender.

This will be of much interest to students of gender studies, security studies, human security and International Relations in general.

1
Gender and security

Framing the agenda

Chantal de Jonge Oudraat and Michael E. Brown

Over the last few decades of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st century, political leaders around the world have made a series of grand public declarations and formal commitments to gender equality in general and the advancement of the role of women in security issues in particular. Unfortunately, there is still an enormous gap between these pronouncements and aspirations, on the one hand, and real-world progress, on the other.

The public proclamations about these issues have been impressive. In 1975, the United Nations (UN) convened the first world conference on the status of women (held in Mexico City), focusing on gender discrimination, gender equality and the roles of women in development and security. In 1979, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), an international bill of rights for women. Since then, 188 of the UN’s 193 member states have ratified and become parties to the CEDAW.¹ In 1995, the fourth World Conference on Women (in Beijing) adopted a Declaration and Platform for Action that specified a series of strategic goals and policy actions for the advancement of women across twelve issue areas, including development, the environment, human rights, armed conflict and participation in decisionmaking.

Spurred by the advocacy of women’s groups, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) in 2000. This landmark resolution formally called on member states and the Secretary-General to increase the participation of women in conflict prevention and conflict resolution processes; it called for the integration of gender perspectives in the negotiation and implementation of peace agreements; and it called for special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence in conflict settings. Nine subsequent UN Security Council resolutions in the 2000s and 2010s have reinforced and refined the WPS agenda. This included a recognition that rape and other forms of sexual violence, which have been employed as tactics of war, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Regional organizations as diverse as the African Union (AU), the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) have developed organization-wide policies and Regional Action Plans (RAPs) to incorporate the guidance from United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 into their deliberations and actions. At the national level, approximately 43 percent of UN member states have developed National Action Plans (NAPs) to implement and advance the WPS agenda.² In 2014, Sweden adopted an explicitly feminist foreign policy. It was the first country in the world to do so.³ In 2015, the 193 member states of the United Nations unanimously adopted a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030, including a stand-alone goal that contained an array of commitments to gender equality, the empowerment and participation of women in political and economic affairs, as well as an end to all forms of discrimination and violence against “all women and girls everywhere.”⁴

Enunciating these goals has been an important step forward. Reaffirming these goals through additional international and national proclamations has been very valuable. All of this has been necessary for progress, but it has not been sufficient. Progress has been limited and uneven. Even where progress has been made, many of the gains are vulnerable and potentially reversible. Problems persist in traditional national and international security areas, such as security policymaking and conflict settings, as well as in areas where non-military and security issues are intertwined.

The underrepresentation of women in national and international security deliberations remains glaring. Between 1992 and 2018, women constituted only three percent of mediators, 13 percent of negotiators and four percent of witnesses and signatories in major peace processes.⁵ Gender perspectives are insufficiently integrated into analyses of national and international security challenges: gender perspectives are usually afterthoughts, if they are thought about at all.

Violence against women and girls has continued at horrifying levels, especially in conflict settings. Since the start of the civil war in South Sudan in 2013, thousands of South Sudanese have been subjected to sexual violence, including rape, gang rape, sexual slavery, sexual mutilation and sexual torture. In one survey, 72 percent of women at UN protection sites reported they had been raped since the onset of the conflict. According to survivors, sexual violence was used as a weapon of war; individuals were often targeted based on their ethnicity or perceived political allegiance.⁶ In 2017, rape was used as a weapon by the Myanmar military in its forced expulsion campaign and genocide against the country’s Rohingya minority.⁷ In Syria, detained political opponents were gang raped by government forces.⁸ Although conflict cases like these stand out, scholars have emphasized that sexual violence is not limited to conflict settings and that gender-based violence takes many forms. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that more than one in three women (35 percent) worldwide have experienced physical and/or sexual violence – often perpetrated by male intimate partners. Because of limitations in available data, it is difficult to determine whether wartime sexual violence and other forms of gender-based violence are increasing, but there is no doubt that these problems are widespread and severe.⁹

Gender inequalities also persist in political, economic and legal matters. In the political arena, women are underrepresented in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government at all levels, from national to local, in most countries around the world. As of January 2019, only 24 percent of all national parliamentarians were women; as of June 2019, only 12 women were serving as Head of Government.¹⁰

Inequalities are multidimensional and intense in the economic realm. A World Bank study has determined that, in 115 out of 131 countries surveyed, women face legal and financial restrictions that men do not face when running a business: 45 percent of countries have laws constraining the types of jobs a woman can occupy; 40 percent of countries limit women’s property rights; and nearly 30 percent of countries restrict women’s freedom of movement. The World Bank has calculated that, on average, women have only three-quarters of the legal rights of men. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa provide women with only half of the legal rights enjoyed by men. Only six countries provide women and men with equal legal standing – Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg and Sweden.¹¹ Women also face persistent gender pay gaps. The International Labor Organization (ILO) has determined that women earn about 20 percent less than men.¹² The McKinsey Global Institute has calculated that advancing women’s equality could add $28 trillion (26 percent) to the global economy in 2025.¹³ The World Economic Forum has estimated that, at the current rate of progress, it will take 257 years to close the economic gender gap.¹⁴

The reasons for the sub-optimal policy record on gender equality and the WPS agenda will be explored issue by issue in the chapters that follow. A few fundamental propositions can be established at the outset.

Gender inequalities exist in the first place because of the ideas people had, and still have, about the roles men and women should play in human affairs – at home and at work, in business and economic affairs, in community and social life and in politics and governance. Gender roles and norms are learned and enforced through institutions – families, schools, religious institutions, local communities, ethnic groups, government agencies, the media – that shape and govern the way people live. Deeply entrenched patriarchal beliefs, cultures and institutions have perpetuated regressive gender stereotypes that, in turn, have perpetuated power asymmetries and gender inequalities in a multitude of issue areas. If the goal is promoting gender equality globally or the specific policy goals of the WPS agenda, multiple arrays of human institutions and cultures will have to be transformed. This is a massive, multi-generational task.

Second, national and international security policy establishments are comprised of and run mainly by men. These policy establishments focus on traditional security threats that are analyzed through traditional lenses and familiar policy frameworks. National security policy establishments are especially attached to traditional threat assessments and traditional policy responses. Intellectual frameworks, organizational cultures, bureaucratic interests and policymaking processes in general tend to be highly resistant to change. Pushing national security establishments to focus on gender-related issues is an especially formidable proposition. Although some states have made declarations in support of gender equality and the WPS agenda, many national security policy establishments continue to treat gender issues as secondary or tertiary issues, and they have been slow to bring women into staff and policymaking positions, especially if this would displace men. Most national security policymaking establishments are lacking in gender expertise and well-informed gender perspectives, and they have a long way to go in mainstreaming gender issues. This is bad for the WPS agenda and the gender equality agenda more generally, but it is also bad for national and international security – which policymakers profess to care about.

A third problem is that the gender equality and WPS agendas have been held back because they have been explicitly framed in terms of “women.” This has made it easy for security policy establishments to echo the prevailing nomenclature, pigeonhole these issues as “women’s” issues and put them on a back burner. The gender equality and WPS agendas have consequently been marginalized in most national security discussions. In addition, UN Security Council resolutions and national political leaders have repeatedly conflated women’s rights and WPS agendas with “women and children,” “women and girls” or “women and youth.” This infant...