Gender, Peace and Security

Implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1325

Louise Olsson, Theodora-Ismene Gizelis, Louise Olsson, Theodora-Ismene Gizelis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317627937
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume explores the implementation of key gender policies in international peace and security, following the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 1325 in October 2000, the first thematic resolution on Women, Peace and Security.

How should we understand women's participation in peace processes and in peace operations? And what forms of gendered security dynamics are present in armed conflict and international interventions? These questions represent central themes of protection and participation that the international community has to address in order to implement UNSCR 1325. Thus far, the implementation has often employed varying approaches related to gender mainstreaming, a third theme of the resolution. Yet, there is a dearth of systematic data which until recently has restricted the ability of researchers to evaluate the progress in implementation and impact of UNSCR 1325.

By engaging with both empirics and critical theory, the authors of this edited volume make important contributions to the gender, peace and security agenda. They identify some of the problems of implementing UNSC 1325 and offer a sobering assessment of progress of implementation and insights into how to advance our understanding through systematic research. Many of the chapters are focused on operational aspects of UNSCR 1325, but all also engage with the theoretical underpinnings of UNSCR 1325 to bring forth central debates on more fundamental challenges to the development of knowledge in the fields of gender, peace and security.

This book will be of much interest to students of gender studies, peace and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general.

1 Participation

1 Women’s participation and peace?

The decline of armed conflict in East Asia¹

Elin Bjarnegård and Erik Melander

DOI: 10.4324/9781315755694-2

Introduction

The United Nations Security Council’s Resolution on Women, Peace and Security (UNSCR 1325) urges member states “to ensure increased representation of women at all decision-making levels in national, regional and international institutions and mechanisms for the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict.” Its language generally stresses that women should participate in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, as well as in peacebuilding. UNSCR 1325 has undoubtedly been an important tool for advocates of women’s rights in conflicts. However, scholars and practitioners alike have pointed to the risk of UNSCR 1325 being used instrumentally in a broad “women, peace and security agenda.” Implicit assumptions about the relationship between women and peace abound and affect the discourse that activists use (El Bushra 2007). More precisely, UNSCR 1325 has been invoked to claim that the increased representation of women in different decision-making bodies is a necessity for sustainable peace (see, for example, Anderlini 2000). Such a use may reinforce, rather than eliminate, gendered stereotypes by essentializing women as mothers and nurturers, who are expected to have a pacifying effect on peace negotiations and decision making at large (Dornig and Goede 2010). Scholars from different fields see a more general trend that gender equality is increasingly being used as a tool, or an instrument, to meet other ends. When gender equality and women’s rights are instrumentalized, they are no longer primarily valued as ends in themselves. Instead, they are used as a means of efficiently implementing other policies and reaching other, more desirable, ends (cf. Bessis 2004; Cohn and Enloe 2003; Olivius 2011; Prügl 2011). Such instrumentalization of gender equality entails, as we will discuss, certain risks.

This chapter takes a deeper look at the issue of parliamentary representation of women and what it means – or does not mean – for peace and security. Numerous statistical studies find a worldwide statistical association between peace, often measured as the absence of intrastate armed conflict, and gender equality, in several important studies measured as the percentage of women in parliament (for example, Caprioli 2000, 2005; Caprioli and Boyer 2001; Gleditsch, Wucherpfennig, Hug and Reigstad 2011; Melander 2005a, 2005b). We argue that one should be very careful when interpreting results where the representation of women is used as an indicator of gender equality, because parliamentary representation implies very different things in different settings.

We show that parliamentary representation of women can be a poor indicator of genuine gender equality in certain contexts by using the example of East Asia. The East Asian setting is particularly well suited for this type of investigation because several countries exhibit relatively high levels of female representation in parliament (for example, China, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam). Nevertheless, these very countries are also examples of political settings where we have reason to question the validity of representation of women in parliament as a measurement of gender equality. These countries are all authoritarian communist regimes, promoting gender equality as a part of communist ideology, and whose representative chambers are not allowed much influence over politics.

East Asia is also interesting as a case because the region has seen a remarkable shift from extremely intense warfare to very low levels of battle deaths (Tønnesson 2009) at roughly the same time as great strides have been made in the representation of women in parliaments. This is therefore one region where we would expect to find a strong correlation between the representation of women in parliament and the decline of armed conflict. It is, however, also a region in which we have ample reason to doubt that correlation implies causality when this relationship is concerned. Theory suggests that one-party states also tend to avoid outbreaks of armed conflict partly because of effective harsh repression that quells any dissent before there is a possibility to organize for armed rebellion (Fjelde 2010). In this chapter, we therefore explore the proposition that in East Asia communism is the driving factor behind both the high representation of women and the avoidance of intrastate armed conflict. We find that it is, indeed, difficult or even impossible to chisel out the effect of representation of women from the effect of communist regimes in East Asia.

Our finding is also reason to question some of the more simplistic assumptions about the role of women in peacemaking, and it may thus contribute to a more nuanced scholarly debate. The fact that there are fewer armed conflicts in countries with more women in parliament easily lends itself to interpretations suggesting that women will make different decisions from those made by men, and that increasing the share of female decision makers hence should benefit peace directly. The use of parliamentary representation of women as a measurement of gender equality thus exacerbates an emerging discourse where the perceived difference of women is pragmatically used as an oversimplified solution to a very complex set of problems having to do with war and peace. Certainly, the concerns we raise do not imply that gender equality is unimportant in issues of war and peace. Rather, we make use of recent feminist critique of the instrumentalization of gender equality in general, and UNSCR 1325 in particular, to point to the idea that gender equality and the representation of women should be considered as issues of justice, in their own right, regardless of the consequences they bring about.

The chapter will proceed as follows. We outline two distinct arguments for why it is unlikely that female parliamentarians will impact on nationwide armed conflict patterns. We focus on communist countries for two reasons. First, while communist countries tend to exhibit relatively high levels of women in parliament, their parliaments also tend to be weak political institutions. Second, literature also suggests that communist countries are particularly likely to be able to avoid open rebellion. In the empirical part of this chapter, we therefore investigate whether the effect of parliamentary representation of women on intrastate armed conflict changes when ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• An introduction to Resolution 1325: measuring progress and impact
• PART I Participation
• PART II Protection
• PART III Gender mainstreaming
• Postscript: challenges and opportunities for forwarding gender, peace and security
• Index