Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security

G. Heathcote, D. Otto, G. Heathcote, D. Otto

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137400208
• eBook ISBN: 9781137400215
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines how the Security Council has approached issues of gender equality since 2000. Written by academics, activists and practitioners the book challenges the reader to consider how women's participation, gender equality, sexual violence and the prevalence of economic disadvantages might be addressed in post-conflict communities.

Part I
Shame

1

The Grip of Sexual Violence: Reading UN Security Council Resolutions on Human Security

Karen Engle

Introduction

The issue I would like to pose in this chapter is about the grip of sexual violence on human security discourse. I do not want to address the violence itself, but to consider why many feminist – and even non-feminist – discussions about human rights and security have become inextricably connected to concerns about sexual violence, primarily but not exclusively against women. I consider here the United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions on what is termed ‘human security’, and debates and media around them. I do so because I believe they are representative of an escalating emphasis on the horrors of sexual violence more generally within international human rights and humanitarian law, discourse and advocacy.

Although the seeming relentless attention to sexual violence in at least some of the Security Council resolutions that I consider is partly a result of the success of a particular feminist strategy, a number of feminists have been critical of it. Women’s peace activists, for example, have expressed concern that the resolutions that emphasise women’s victimisation detract from the goal of seeing women as agents of change during peacemaking.¹ Some have sought or supported a number of other resolutions that call for increased participation of women in peacebuilding. Indeed, two types of resolutions about women – those that concentrate on women as victims of conflict and others that see women as central to the peace process – tend to leapfrog over each other in terms of passage at the Security Council.

Yet, the understanding of the harm of sexual violence as one of the worst injuries that can occur during armed conflict, I contend, can be found in nearly all the resolutions and among those who express competing perspectives on the extent to which the resolutions should focus on sexual violence. My chapter is therefore aimed largely at those who have expressed the criticism I just described. I hope to encourage them to rethink their own assumptions about the harm of sexual violence, rather than simply consider where the attention should be concentrated.

In this chapter, I situate the Security Council resolutions on human security and the discourse around them within three trends that I see in human rights and humanitarian law and advocacy more generally. First, the past few years have seen increased attention to sexual violence, even as against gender-based violence against women. Sometimes the two are elided, while other times women are no longer the specific concern. Either way, the prevailing view of sexual violence continues to be that it is a ‘fate worse than death’. Second, human rights law, advocacy and discourse have, over the past 20 years, increasingly turned to criminal law for enforcement, with the fight against impunity as central to that turn. Consequently, those who oppose sexual violence often do so by focussing on ending impunity for perpetrators.² Third, celebrity calls for first-world solidarity with mostly third-world victims of human rights violations have become increasingly popular in recent years. Some of the work of the UN to end sexual violence in conflict deploys such calls.

These three trends partly come together in the work of UN Action against Sexual Violence (UN Action), a multi-agency initiative begun in 2007 to bring attention and response to sexual violence in war. Its Stop Rape Now Campaign is a multimedia and largely web-based effort designed to provoke indignation at sexual violence, with at least the partial hope that it will result in individuals pressuring Security Council member states to pass resolutions on sexual violence. I will consider here two YouTube videos produced and disseminated by UN Action, and will argue that, in their attempt to appeal to first-world outrage, they oversimplify both sexual violence and conflict in ways that display and reinforce an assumption that victims are forever destroyed, in part due to shame and stigmatisation that they see as accompanying sexual violence in conflict. Similar oversimplifications can be seen in the resolutions, as well as in the international criminal responses to sexual violence that the Security Council resolutions call for.

I share with many women’s peace activists the concern that calls for an analysis of the gendered nature and production of war (and peace) have often been responded to by an emphasis on the harm of sexual violence for women. I show, however, how over time the scope has been extended to sexual violence against men and children (both boys and girls) as well. And I explore, perhaps a bit more than many of the critics, what that attention to sexual violence means. I do so at the risk of perpetuating the very hyper-attention to sex I criticise. I attribute much of this hyper-attention to something akin to what queer theorists call ‘sex panic’.³ Seen through this lens, the Security Council resolutions, including those promoted by the women’s peace movement, aid in the production or at least reinforcement of particular types of ‘proper’ sexuality (heterosexual, of a certain age, monogamous, within the same ethnic group and so on).⁴ They also, perhaps inadvertently for some, reinforce the shame of rape.

This chapter proceeds as follows. The first section provides some of the context of the resolutions, and then demonstrates how they have become increasingly concerned with sexual violence – against both males and females. It also considers the various understandings of the harm of sexual violence that the resolutions convey. The next section discusses UN Action’s multimedia campaign to show how some of the same assumptions and trends I identify in the resolutions can be found there, as well as to shed light on how human rights law and discourse circulate in that public space.

United Nations Security Council resolutions and sexual violence

Initially prompted by a group of states that banded together in 1999 to form the ‘human security network’, the UN Security Council had, by mid-2013, passed 20 thematic resolutions that attend specifically to the treatment in armed conflict of civilians, children and women (three distinct, if overlapping, categories for the resolutions).⁵ All passed unanimously. They largely embody international humanitarian law, and increasingly seek to apply the rules not only to states and non-state actors, but to the UN as well in its peacekeeping operations. As is the pattern with Security Council resolutions in general, there is much repetition and self-reference in the resolutions, with each one becoming more specific than the one that preceded it about the harm to be attended to and the various enforcement mechanisms that should be used to address it. In 2009, the Security Council passed four such resolutions that are reflective of the group focus they have taken – one on civilians, one on children, one primarily on women as victims of war and one considering the need to ensure women’s participation in the peacebuilding process.⁶ In 2010, however, Security Council Resolution 1960 (SCR 1960) broke the mould by turning to sexual violence as a theme. As I discuss below, SCR 1960 explicitly addresses sexual violence against women and children but, because its operative paragraphs are gender-neutral, some have read it as applying to sexual violence against men as well. A later resolution, Security Council Resolution 2106 (SCR 2106), specifically references men and boys as victims of sexual violence.

A number of other chapters in this collection consider Security Council Resolution 1325 (SCR 1325), passed in 2000.⁷ It constitutes the first of the Security Council resolutions on women that feminists and women’s peace activists generally consider. It is often discussed, along with Security Council Resolution 1889 (SCR 1889) – one of the 2009 resolutions mentioned above – as somewhat exceptional because the two specifically focus on the role of women in peacebuilding, rather than on women’s victimisation in war as civilians. These two resolutions can be contrasted with Security Council Resolution 1820 (SCR 1820) and Security Council Resolution 1888 (SCR 1888), as well as with SCR 1960 and SCR 2106, which are seen by a number of women’s peace activists to place too much emphasis on women’s victimisation.⁸

While most feminists who have considered the treatment of sexual violence in the resolutions have concentrated on these resolutions that are specific to women or sexual violence, I believe that we gain important insight into the Security Council’s understanding of both gender-based and sexual violence when looking at these resolutions in tandem with those more broadly on civilians and those that pertain primarily to children. In doing so, we can identify a general trend from an emphasis on gender-based violence against women and girls; to a specific concern about sexual violence against ‘women and girls’ and sometimes ‘women and children’; and finally to an explicit attention to sexual violence, regardless of those against whom it is aimed. In this section, I demonstrate that trend before turning to the way in which sexual violence, in nearly all the resolutions and the discussion around them, has come to be treated as the quintessential harm of war – for males and females as well as children and adults.

From gender-based violence to sexual violence against women and children

The treatment of civilians constitutes the primary concern of most of the resolutions, regardless of the group of civilians on which they concentrate. The two early resolutions aimed broadly at the protection of civilians in armed conflict refer to both women and children as particularly vulnerable groups that require special attention.⁹ The first mention of sexual violence can be found in Security Council Resolution 1261 (SCR 1261), passed in 1999. That resolution, which is also the first specifically on children, condemns as grave breaches the ‘targeting of children’ through sexual violence as well as ‘killing and maiming’, ‘abduction and forced displacement’, ‘recruitment and use of children in armed conflict in violation of international law’ and ‘attacks on … schools and hospitals’.¹⁰ The same resol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword by Madeleine Rees
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security: An Introduction: Dianne Otto and Gina Heathcote
• Part I Shame
• Part II Hope
• Part III Danger
• Part IV Silences
• Part V Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index