The Complicated Reality of Women in Peacekeeping
Emi-Tihana Barker, YSC Research Fellow
TW – Mention of sexual violence
© pictureAlliance/dpa
Peacekeeping missions are now an integral aspect of international politics. Monitoring the freedom and fairness of elections, training national police forces, protecting civilians, and handing out immediate medical and food supplies are just some of the tasks that modern day peacekeeping missions are expected to fulfill. However, as the responsibilities of peacekeepers expand, so do expectations of their skill set. The successful completion of these missions now requires not only brawn and might but communication skills, effective engagement with locals, and respect for local cultures. This increasing need for soft skills combined with the burgeoning importance of women’s equality on the global political stage has raised calls around increasing the number of women present on peacekeeping missions.
First laid out in Resolution 1325 (UN, 2000) and then further expanded on in Resolution 1820 (UN, 2008), increasing women’s presence in peacekeeping falls largely in the participation pillar of the WPS agenda. Fundamentally, the UN argues that women bring a variety of strategic advantages to peacekeeping missions, particularly when it comes to issues of gender sensitivity within missions. For the UN, female peacekeepers can: act as role models to local women, bridge cultural divides in places where women are not expected to speak to men outside of their immediate family, perform body searches on women, and deal with victims of sexual violence. However, increasing the presence of women in peacekeeping missions has been slow and numbers continue to plateau. In 2020, women comprised only 4.8% of peacekeepers globally and only 10.9% of police units (UN Women in Peacekeeping, 2020).
However, feminist academics and activists warn against a simple ‘add women and stir’ approach in which women are inserted into organisations while leaving the pre-existing patriarchal structures intact. In following this line of thought, academics have asked themselves: ‘do women really make a difference to peacekeeping?’ By exploring the variety of responses to this question within this article, the answer is context dependent. Considering three key areas surrounding the debate for the increased presence of women in peacekeeping, this article presents a variety of research which posits that women’s mere presence alone is unlikely to transform the nature of peacekeeping and that increasing their numbers must be further met with institutional and logistical support that allows women to exercise their true potential in peacekeeping.
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The 1992 UN mission in Cambodia was the first instance of the issue of peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) brought to public attention (Nordas & Rustad, 2013). With massive increases in sexual trafficking into the area in which peacekeepers were stationed as well as concerns over the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS, the missions head and Japanese diplomat Yasushi Akashi famously summarised the situation with “boys will be boys” and the UN shipped 800,000 condoms to the region (Kasztelan, 2021). Since then, SEA continually pervades peacekeeping missions, with almost no mission since being free of allegations of SEA against peacekeepers by locals. While the UN has taken various steps to combat the issue, one of the key weapons in its arsenal is women. The UN posits that the increased presence of women within missions will positively influence SEA rates, as women are significantly less likely to commit such crimes and will also have a tempering influence on the other men in the mission (Simic, 2010), but do they?
A range of factors - personal and external - mediate female peacekeepers' ability to reduce rates of SEA within missions. While some female peacekeepers have reported successfully challenging the comments and behaviors of their male colleagues while they are present, they have also reported that this effect is partial, with the women having no say over what men say or do while they are out of their presence (Heinecken, 2015). Female peacekeepers must also make a range of personal value judgments in the decision to further pursue allegations against their colleagues. Furthermore, female peacekeepers must keep in mind their personal safety. They may choose to value a civil working relationship with their male colleagues while on mission rather than challenging poor behaviour, essentially meaning they may turn a blind eye to inappropriate behavior. Ultimately, feminist researchers underline that the presence of women is unlikely to solve issues of toxic masculinity and sexual violence and that, more importantly, it shouldn’t be. Placing the responsibility of policing men on the shoulders of women gives female peacekeepers the unfair job of being the watchman of someone else’s behaviour. As Simic (2013) notes, “diverting responsibility to women does not address the problem of sexual violence in peacekeeping operations, nor does it help to eradicate its causes.” (p. 2).
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Since female peacekeepers largely stem from state level militaries of UN member states, it is easy for these women to be subsumed by the masculine nature of missions, rather than challenging it. Although academics have pointed out that, of course, peacekeeping missions are different to military operations, they are still pervaded by a peacekeeper masculinity that relies on an inferior ‘other’ and requires peacekeepers to fit into ‘good soldier’ molds (Duncanson, 2009; Heinecken, 2015). Such research helps to complicate the narrative of female peacekeepers as both inherently peaceful and more in tune with the needs and feelings of local women. For example, reports have detailed how Dutch female peacekeepers in Bosnia and Kosovo treated their female counterparts with derision, arguing that ‘more women, more arguments’ and that they isolated themselves from other women since ‘all my friends back home are men’ (Sion, 2009; p. 482). This ambivalence extended to local women in Bosnia, as the women reported they did not think of them as it was not their job to do so (ibid).
Female peacekeepers are demonstrably mired in the same oppressive, masculinised culture as their male colleagues and are further influenced by their personal views and national culture. These female peacekeepers are, therefore, just as capable of propagating negative stereotypes as creating positive interactions. As more recent fieldwork in missions in Haiti, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo has found, some female peacekeepers were also complicit in the creation of racialised and misogynistic constructions of local men as “ignorant, highly sexed, and incapable of caring for ‘their’ women.” (Jennings, 2019; p. 33). This is not to disparage the good work that female peacekeepers do but rather to challenge the essentialist foundations that underpin calls for women’s inclusion in peacekeeping. Women are not peaceful creatures whose numbers in peacekeeping missions are simply to be increased, but dynamic actors imbued with their own cultural and personal biases, similarly affected by the overall culture of the institutions they work in as their male counterparts. Peacekeeping missions must focus on the gender sensitivity training of all members and challenge the masculine nature of peacekeeping missions, rather than relying on stereotypical beliefs of the nature of women to do the job for them.
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The reality of female peacekeepers' abilities to foster long-term gender development within missions is not only complicated by individual biases or mission culture, but also by factors outside of the peacekeepers control such as technological infrastructure and digital development. Female peacebuilders have successfully used the online space to disseminate information about peace agreements and spread peaceful messaging, which counteracts over-militarized narratives (Garrido & Mariateresa, 2022). Highlighting technology’s use for good in post-conflict development, they often find that the digital sphere “reproduce(s), and often amplify(ies), the patriarchal structures, practices, and culture of” their organisation, mission, or the states they operate in (Buzatu, Fal-Duta Santos, et al, 2021).
Thus, with digital platforms being increasingly used to spread disinformation and misogynistic content as well as to facilitate illegal activity such as trafficking and sexual exploitation, women are often the disproportionate victims of digital violence and conflict (Ebassa, et al., 2023). Further, they are often denied access to (critical) technological infrastructure (Peace Direct, 2020), with the consequent power imbalances severely affecting their inclusion in peace processes and advocacy work. As such, female peacebuilders regularly face pervasive gendered norms in the states in which they operate, which translate into the digital sphere and act as barriers to their work (Peace Direct, 2020). From being digitally threatened and abused as part of intimidation tactics from those opposed to their mission, or having their work undone or limited in effect due to elaborate disinformation campaigns, to struggling with digital literacy gaps (within the mission and the local community) – as peacekeeping activities expand to the digital realm female peacekeepers' work is further aided yet complicated by technological advancement and digitalisation.
As technology and the internet become an ever more ubiquitous feature of global life, peacekeeping missions must take stock of technological infrastructure and the barriers it presents to both conflict-affected women and female peacekeepers when considering post-conflict development. Hence, in today’s expanded peacekeeping missions, the genuine fulfillment of the UN’s goals towards women’s post-conflict empowerment requires supporting female peacekeepers by ensuring that digital tools and spaces are inclusive and accessible to the local community in the long term (Strumpf, 2023) as well as the development of increased awareness of the dangers and barriers female colleagues face in the digital realm.
Conclusion
There is a myriad of issues facing the successful completion of peacekeeping missions, especially as they pertain to women post-conflict will require a myriad of solutions. However, despite the multifaceted nature of the problem of protecting and improving women’s rights post-conflict, a large share of the responsibility for correcting this issue has been placed on women themselves. Women have been called to peacekeeping missions to act as a civilising force on their male colleagues, support survivors of sexual violence, and act as role models for local women to aspire to. However, putting these responsibilities on female peacekeepers is likely only to paper over the cracks rather than transform the structure itself. Female peacekeepers themselves are complex individuals constrained and influenced by a variety of external factors and personal beliefs in the same ways as their male counterparts. While the experiences of women no doubt brings interesting and useful skills and perspectives to the table, improving the success of future missions will require more than a few extra women. Ultimately, while calls for female peacekeepers should be welcomed within international politics, these calls should not rest on stereotypical beliefs of women and should be further supported by broader reforms and long-term planning to truly transform the lives of women surviving conflict.
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