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The Arms Trade Treaty & Gender-Based Violence: Challenges Require Data & Willpower

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by Hannah Papachristidis,

‘Non-Violence’ also known as ‘The Knotted Gun’, bronze sculpture by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, 1985. (Source: https://untappedcities.com/2020/05/15/art-while-you-walk-in-the-sculpture-gardens-in-nyc/10/ )

The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is the first global arms control instrument to acknowledge, and create obligations around, the connection between international arms transfers and gender-based violence (GBV). The treaty’s adoption in 2013 followed over a decade of campaign work led by Oxfam, Amnesty International and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), which galvanised international popular support for the instrument as well as political engagement. Within this international campaign was a focus on the inclusion of references to the link between GBV and the arms trade by a group of civil society organisations, including Reaching Critical Will (the disarmament programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), IANSA and Amnesty International.

The ATT is the first arms control agreement that centres around humanitarian concerns and is notable for introducing the notion of responsibility on the part of exporting states. It obliges states to assess whether there is an overriding risk that the export of arms to another country will be used for, or to commit, violations of international humanitarian law or of the Geneva Convention. With regards to GBV, the treaty obliges state parties to assess whether items exported would contribute to or facilitate acts of GBV. It is the only human rights infringement which is addressed through a standalone article.

Acts of GBV take place in both conflict and non-conflict contexts, in both domestic and public spaces. Conventional weapons can, and are regularly, used to inflict discriminatory violence based on a person’s gender. Moreover, the trade, possession and use of arms have specific gender and power dimensions. The link between the arms trade and gender-based violence, therefore, is one which interrogates power relations and social norms. Article 7 of the treaty addresses the obligations of party states with regards to permitted exports and within this article, part (4) states:

The exporting State Party, in making this assessment, shall take into account the risk of the conventional arms covered under Article 2 (1) or of the items covered under Article 3 or Article 4 being used to commit or facilitate serious acts of gender-based violence or serious acts of violence against women and children.

States are therefore mandated to undertake a gender-sensitive risk assessment of all potential exports. In order to produce an effective risk assessment, states need a comprehensive understanding of gender relations in the importing country and the implications for the risk of GBV, as well as data on the occurrences of GBV by the end-user.

It is widely recognised that data on violence against women and gender-based violence is significantly underreported and likely to be unreliable. Levels of reporting are impacted by stigmas surrounding this type of violence and power imbalances in society that create barriers to reporting. According to UN Women, less than forty per cent of women who experience violence seek help of any sort and, of those seeking help, less than ten per cent appealed to the police. Where data relating to gender-based violence is collected, it is further complicated by the issue that there is no universally accepted definition of GBV, meaning that countries collect different data on aspects of the violence. The lack of standardisation in data collection, therefore, means comparisons and global trends are hard to infer. Finally, data relating to how different categories and types of arms and arms users facilitate GBV are even more rare.

The challenges surrounding assessing the risk of GBV for arms exports are widely recognised by the international community. A paper presented by Ireland to the 2017 Conference of State Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty (CSP), lambasted Article 7(4) for being ‘overly broad, unenforceable and unverifiable’. In 2019, the theme of the CSP5 was gender and arms-related gender-based violence. The CSP5 President’s working paper outlined issues around implementing GBV risk assessments including the vague language in Article 7(4) and the importance of sharing national practices with regards to undertaking this risk assessment. The ATT Monitor report reflecting on CSP5 emphasised again the “uneven understanding among States Parties of what constitutes or facilitates an act of GBV, the ways in which the ATT addresses GBV and how GBV can be incorporated into Articles 6 and 7 risk assessment obligations”. Whilst the ATT may have been groundbreaking for its references to GBV, it is clear now that this obligation should have been more specifically defined such to allow for uniform implementation.

The organisations which campaigned for the inclusion of GBV obligations in the ATT have moved to take on an active role monitoring the implementation of these obligations. In particular, many of these organisations have reflected on these challenges and  have produced resources and guidelines on best practice for implementation. Reaching Critical Will, for example, has published a range of resources on the effective implementation of GBV obligations. Many of these have a strong focus on the need for more comprehensive data collection and sharing practices. Their 2016 report revealed that no country explicitly includes GBV in their end-user documentation and most countries rely on human rights reports rather than specific assessments of GBV. As such, there is often little evidence of the link between arms transfers and GBV because the data used does not interrogate the occurrence of systemic gender-based violence by the end-user. The report provides guidelines for export officials, including examples of how arms facilitate GBV and indicators of GBV that could be used for a risk assessment.

A similar ‘practical guidance’ report was published by Control Arms, which outlines a four-stage approach to incorporating GBV into export assessments. Their report also outlines an extensive library of information sources and datasets corresponding to indicators relating to the prevalence of GBV and state commitments. As with the RCW report, this report is written to provide export officials “with a framework within which to systematically consider GBV in export assessments”. These two reports provide foundational knowledge for states which do not have existing expertise on GBV risk assessments and go some way to cement understanding on the link between GBV and arms transfers.

A recent report by Greenpeace focused specifically on Germany’s arms exports and gender-based violence. The report emphasises the importance of gender-sensitive human rights assessments rather than a general human rights focus and the need for the German government to include a specific criterion relating to the risk of GBV in its risk assessment as well as to improve internal training on the relation of GBV to arms transfers. Greenpeace draws upon research by both RCW and Control Arms to present cases of ‘best practice’, which include Latvia’s questionnaire on the prevalence of GBV in the recipient country and the UK’s updated licensing criteria legislation which includes reference to the risk of GBV.

As Control Arms, Greenpeace and RCW highlight in their publications, gender-based violence is systematically under-reported. In terms of data collection, it is a hidden violence. Consequently, it is not enough to rely on a gender-neutral human rights assessment to assess the risk of GBV within the export of arms. That GBV is the only human rights concern to be addressed with a standalone article in the ATT, highlights the need for governments to specifically focus on overcoming tendencies to overlook GBV. Despite elevation within the treaty however, this need is hindered by the vague language of Article 7(4) and the lack of an agreed definition of GBV weakens systematic global monitoring.

For civil society and advocates of the treaty, the ATT has been disappointing. The UK’s continued exports of weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in the Yemen war, in the face of clear evidence that the Saudi-led coalition continues to target civilians and violates international humanitarian law, has been a significant failure for the ATT’s progress. With implementation of the most basic export assessments failing as in the case of the UK, it can be easy to disregard the importance of other components of the treaty. Perhaps, however, if there was a more comprehensive evidence base and a strong practice of collecting gender-disaggregated data, the clear evidence of the importance of GBV to arms transfers would be more difficult to ignore.

The international civil society has created a wealth of resources addressing the implementation of obligations around gender-based violence in arms transfers. Although the challenges are significant and will take time to surmount, it is critical that states step up, heed the guidance presented to them, invest in gender-specific expertise, and take their responsibilities seriously.

Hannah Papachristidis is a project officer at Transparency International Defence & Security, where she manages research outputs for the 2020 Government Defence Integrity Index. She holds an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and is an Emerging Expert at Forum on the Arms Trade.

The Forgotten Casualties: The Indirect Gendered Consequences of Explosive Violence on Civilian Populations

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by Miles Cameron Hunter

9 July 2019

One of thousands of Syria’s widows; Hanaa’s husband went missing before their son was even born. She now struggles to support him on her own. (Image credit: 2014 UNRWA Photo by Taghrid Mohammad)

Explosive violence is a feature of most contemporary armed conflicts. It comes in many forms: from mortars and airstrikes, to landmines and suicide bombings. Tragically, it is civilians who face the brunt. There is little sign of this trend abating: the casualty monitor run by Action on Armed Violence observed a 165% increase in civilian deaths as a result of explosive violence between 2011 and 2017.

The impact of explosive violence is far-reaching, triggering numerous indirect consequences beyond an initial blast; this affects everything from the provision of effective healthcare, to education and sanitation. However, this piece focuses on a less-discussed impact of explosive violence: the series of indirect gender-related consequences. Patriarchal societal norms and values in many war-torn regions often result in women being immensely disadvantaged. Meanwhile, the traditional impression that men are the chief actors in war is still overstated, frequently leading to the impact on women going unseen. These views persist even as explosive violence in modern war harms a growing number of women and children. Women regularly find themselves widowed in societies that repress their independence, raising families alone in poverty while often enduring limited access to health and after care services. Greater awareness regarding these gender-based issues is overdue.

For men, the consequences are often more self-evident. As a result, they tend to overshadow the subtler, but no less important, impact on women. The raw statistics suggest that men and boys are more likely to be harmed in an explosive incident than women, especially when looking at landmines or explosive remnants of war (ERWs). According to data from 2015, 86% of explosive incidents where the gender was known involved men. A main reason for this is societal norms and traditional gender roles that are often present in affected areas.

In many of the worst hit regions, such as Syria and Zimbabwe, it is commonplace for men to be the chief breadwinners for the family, while afflicted regions also tend to be more economically disadvantaged. As a result, occupations such as farming and scrap salvaging are notably at risk, with labourers (usually men) forced to work dangerous land to provide for their families.

But there are more indirect gendered-consequences. In societies where it is the norm for a man to provide, a maimed father has a knock-on effect on the family. Often, it is children, generally boys, who are pulled out of school to work instead, facing the same dangers from explosive ordnance. Women also suffer the cost.

Despite being more likely to suffer direct consequences of blasts, men are also in a more advantageous position to cope by receiving treatment and/or finding alternate employment. This is largely due to gender-based bias in many affected societies. Dr Sherry Wren, in association with Doctors Without Borders, has expressed concerns that medical treatment in conflict zones, such as those in Sub-Sharan Africa and the Middle East, is far less accessible to women. Data suggests that sixty-nine percent of surgeries between 2008 and 2014 were on men, leading to fears that women are under-represented in hospitals due to their second-class societal status. It is true that for direct violent trauma, such as gunshot wounds and explosive injuries, seventy percent of surgeries were performed on men. This is not surprising. However, the alarming figure is that even for indirect trauma, such as illness and disease, seventy-three percent of surgeries were performed on men. This is a stark inequality.

The key finding of this report is that women endure many long-term, and often overlooked, indirect consequences of explosive violence. In general, there is already an issue with long-term trauma in post-war states being neglected. However, for women this is exacerbated due to a second-class status in the patriarchal societies that make up the majority of modern conflict zones. Injured women are less likely to have access to aftercare services and generally face more stigma and marginalisation than men if disfigured; according to  UN research into gender-based perceptions of war survivors. There are also health complications unique to women. For instance, a blast can damage the female placenta, leading to direct or indirect complications in childbirth in future: indeed, this is one of the biggest killers of young women according to the WHO.

Women in Non-Western patriarchal societies also suffer from many indirect socio-economic consequences of explosive violence. Those widowed, or who have a husband incapacitated, face a plethora of struggles. They find themselves in a position where they must be chief breadwinner in cultures that frequently militate against women working, while also retaining the responsibility of raising children.

In Syria and Lebanon, fifty percent of families with a female head face food insecurity and are twice as likely to live in deprived informal settlements. Many women struggle to find work due to gender-based stigma. As a result, they risk being dragged into poverty and/or forced into exploitative means of income such as sex work or seeking early marriage for young girls. All of this can cause intense psychological scarring, which although not as immediately evident as physical injury, can be equally debilitating.

Even when women struggling in the aftermath of explosive violence do find conventional work there are harsh inequalities. In Lebanon, it is reported that women often work longer hours than men for just seventy-seven percent of what their male counterparts earn, while also having demanding maternal duties.

There are many more hardships facing women than those documented in this report. But its findings are demonstrative of clear gender-based issues persisting in civilian populations affected by explosive violence. The notion that men are the primary actors in war still prevails despite the ever-greater toll on women and children. Consequently, the plight of thousands of women affected by explosive incidence often goes unnoticed.  As awareness for their predicament grows, traditional assumptions need to evolve along with the changing nature of war.

Miles Hunter graduated from King’s College London with a BA in War Studies and an MA in Terrorism, Security and Society. He is currently a researcher with the charitable NGO Action on Armed Violence.

Donald Trump and the Perils of Modern Masculinity

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By: Harris Kuemmerle

 

The recent release of comments made by Donald Trump in 2005 brought to light what many people have known for a number of years; that Donald Trump has a problem with women. In these comments his misogyny was laid bare and evident, and millions of people have been rightly appalled and disgusted in its wake. For those who may be unaware, this latest scandal to hit the Trump campaign erupted late last week when a video was released showing Mr. Trump making a number of comments about women which ran from the nauseating, to the genuinely illegal. One comment in particular, has been seized upon as particularly reprehensible. Where in Mr. Trump states that when you are a star you can do anything, including, ‘Grab them [women] by the pussy [vagina]. You can do anything.’.

While these comments are clearly reprehensible and have garnered a rare apology from Mr. Trump, attempts have also been made to spin these comments in a lighter tone. In the days following the release, it was stated and repeated by numerous figures in the media and politics that these comments amounted to nothing more than ‘locker room talk’, or more generally the kind of meaningless banter men often discuss with each other. Conversely, others claim that his comments are nothing more than the glorification of violent assault. Regardless, it is right to condemn these comments and point out that the vast majority of men discuss sex and relationships amongst themselves as a vital part of male friendships and without ever condoning or bragging about assault or abuse. However, it would also be naïve, to suggest that Donald Trump does not represent to some degree the current zeitgeist of American society at large.

We exist in a society where young boys are conditioned from birth to feel that to be a man means to be aggressive, unemotional, and even violent in the pursuit of individual gain. Terminology such as conquest, or score as a way to describe male sexual exploits speaks volumes. Likewise, anyone who falls outside of these neat categories is ostracised, especially gay and lesbian people. While characteristics such as compassion, empathy, and vulnerability are perceived as feminine and admonished. We see the consequences of this all around us from domestic abuse, to the epidemic of rape and sexual assault where almost one in five women in the United States will be raped during their lifetime, especially on university campuses. We see it in the pay and opportunity gap, disproportionate representation in politics, the economy, and science, and yes we also see it in the rise of Donald Trump. Indeed, the real scandal of Donald Trump’s comments is not in what he said, but in that his words present a disturbingly accurate reflection of American society. A society where men have both a perceived and very real feeling of structural, social, and sexual ownership and superiority over women; and that successful men have earned the right to act as they please.

The uncomfortable truth is that it’s not just that Donald Trump has a problem with women. It is that our society as a whole has a problem with women and gender asymmetry. Donald Trump, in all his sexism, misogyny, bigotry, and locker room talk, is a reflection and caricature of the patrilineal society in which he was brought up. However, in his campaign he also has the effect of both propagating contemporary sexism and in promoting the idea of a less equal society. His rhetoric and campaigning make it clear that he represents an attempt to not just ‘make America great again’, but to make the American male great again (and by extension American society) by returning it to its classical binary gendered form; and pushing back against the many accomplishments of so many female and male feminist and LGBTQ activists in recent decades. This is the real danger of a Donald Trump presidency. The potential to undo decades’ worth of work on a range of issues from race relations to economic equality. However, the risk to gender and sexual equality and the vindication of a section of American society which seeks to turn back the clock to an imagined time and place when men were men, and girls were girls, is particularly worrisome.

However, fixing sexism is not just about defeating Donald Trump. The root cause of sexism in our society must be understood as being partly a product of a rigid and binary gender dynamic which values aggression over empathy, which prioritises men over women, and violence over cooperation. These are not just women’s issues, or secondary issues for another day, these are human issues which affect us all; right now and in the foreseeable future. From the numerous and incalculable consequences for women, to homophobia and transphobia, to the significantly higher rates of suicide and mental health issues in men as opposed to women, to the clear link between female empowerment and long-term development success; the consequences of our current concept of gender in society are very real and very destructive.

Now more than ever this discussion is needed. To not just admonish Donald Trump as a pariah, but to understand the society and the gendered norms that created him. It is up to all of us to push back against all forms of bigotry. However, it is especially up to men of all backgrounds, classes, orientations, and gender identities to stand up to sexism and objectification in all its forms by calling it out at every opportunity and chastising those who engage in it both privately and in public. It is only by doing so that we can hope to prevent sexism and misogyny and help ensure a better future for both our daughters and our sons.

 

 

Harris is a PhD candidate in both the War Studies and Geography departments at King’s College London, as well as the Editor-in-Chief of Strife. He received a BSc in International Relations from Plymouth University and an MSc in Asian Politics from SOAS, University of London which focused on the Indo-Bangladeshi Ganges River dispute. His main areas of interest include; hydropolitics, human and state environmental security, climate change, environmental extremism, centre-state relations, and transboundary disputes. With additional interests in gender dynamics, interactive entertainment, and the role of science in society. His main region of focus is South Asia with additional expertise on the US, UK, and Europe. A native of the US, he has been based in the UK since 2008. You can follow him on Twitter: @HarrisKuemmerle

 

Notes:

Image Credit: https://static.pexels.com/photos/48566/pexels-photo-48566.jpeg 

Gender and the War on Terror

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By Caroline Cottet:

Specialist Lynndie England holds an Iraqi detainee on a lead at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, 2003. Photo: Wikipedia.

When making sense of the people and things around us, it is often tempting to rely on binaries. There’s “us” and there’s “them”, there are “men” and “women”, “masculinities” and “femininities”, some are “white” others are not. These lists apply to our our daily routines as much as to extraordinary events. For example, the last few days have seen various forms of celebration for International Women’s Day. The ways in which such an occasion is observed highlight the common dichotomy between “men” and “women”. This constructed binary, like many others, may seem harmless. But those who consider themselves to be outside of that binary construction would disagree, arguing that if you do not conform to the binary labels then you might suffer intolerance, insecurity and perhaps even violence. The extent to which such binaries are problematic is most visible in the War on Terror, as this article sets out to demonstrate.

When the War on Terror was first announced by President George Bush in 2001, it was set up as a simple war of good against evil. The media, caught up in the post-9/11 hysteria, largely followed this narrative. But what has been missing from our general understanding of the War on Terror has been the importance of gender power relations in defining its narrative. While there is a wealth of scholarship on the subject, researchers in gender studies have a tendency to use technical language and to remain within strict academic circles. This is an attempt to step outside of that circle.

Gender can be understood on several levels and so should the War on Terror. On the individual level, certain policies target people because of their gender (such as liberating Afghan women and condemning Taliban men). On a collective level, Western culture is deemed vulnerable and feminised against the dangerous and masculinised “Other”, represented for a long time by al-Qaeda. [1] Gender is socially and politically constructed, it is immaterial yet at times instrumental. Ultimately, gendered narratives and power relations are mutually reinforcing, and make violence possible.

Looking at gender does not mean analysing the positions of men and women as subjects of masculinities and femininities respectively; gender should be considered beyond bodies, and in parallel with other binaries, such as that of skin colour. This is called “intersectionality”.

On an individual level, there is commonly understood to be a static correspondence between gender and sex. In other words, visual instincts draw people to assume that ‘men’ and ‘women’ will behave in certain ways, according to their gender. Traditionally, the gender binary also follows that of gendered roles in war: men and women; the Just Warrior and the Beautiful Soul; the protector and the protected, the soldier and the civilian. [2] While this construction has been increasingly debated and undermined on a theoretical level since the 1950s, [3] it nonetheless presents the major challenge in trying to make sense of several distressing episodes during the War on Terror.

One of these episodes was the torture at Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison, in 2003. Photographs of the abuse were widely circulated, and people struggled to make sense of what they were seeing, principally because it did not jive with their understandings of the supposed man / woman binary.

During the scandal Lynndie England received most attention. A female-identified soldier, her acts called for extraordinary justifications: a Sjobergian Monster, a victim of feminine submissiveness by blindly obeying her – male – superior; or a subject deprived of feminine characteristics with an androgynous body. [4] Worst of all for Barbara Ehrenreich was that the photographs represented “imperial arrogance, sexual depravity … and gender equality”. [5] Gender equality?! Ehrenreich’s last, and preposterous, suggestion points to an important mistake: gender cannot be understood solely on an individual level. Trying to do so fails to unveil the gendered power relations that underlay the War on Terror.

Instead, we should consider gender beyond bodies. The femininities were not the female-identified US-soldiers, and the masculinities were not the male-identified prisoners. Instead, Abu Ghraib prisoners were feminised and members of the American armed forces were hyper-masculinised. Torture aside, the emasculation of the “Other” also proceeded domestically in visual representations. For example, an increase in male media anchors to cover the War on Terror, the figure of the heroic male firefighter of 9/11, and posters with sexual humour depicting Ben Laden as “gay”. [6]

In Abu Ghraib, the process of emasculation was much less subtle:

And he called…me “faggot” because I was wearing the women’s underwear, and my answer was “no”. Then he told me “why are you wearing this underwear”, then I told them, “Because you make me wear it”.    (Abu Ghraib Detainee #151108) [7]

When instructing naked male prisoners to wear women’s underwear, when they were held on a leash, or were covered in red ink that was supposedly menstrual blood, the gendered dynamic was one of inequality, inequality between the American hegemony and its inferior enemy. [8] This is not an attempt to point fingers. Rather, I am trying to make sense of the power relations present in gendered torture.

The particular relationship between the torturer and the tortured is not just gendered, but also racialized. There are the populations that can be tortured and those that cannot. [9] And yet another binary: that of the Occident (i.e. the Western or European political entities between the Enlightenment and the early 20th century) and its construction of the Orient (the broad stereotypes characterising the Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, dangerous and so on). [10] Such a dichotomy might sound like a caricature, yet what happened in Abu Ghraib was made possible by anthropological research on “Muslim culture” published in a manual called The Arab Mind. [11] Torture during the War on Terror, of which the abuses in Abu Ghraib are merely the most prominent example, were designed based on a certain archetype of the Arab/Muslim man, who would be most vulnerable to sexual humiliation, in particular when produced by a woman. [12] This shows that it is difficult to dissociate the gendered binary from the racialized one.

What I want to highlight is that binaries are not disconnected. They are all historically constructed and follow a hierarchical logic. The celebrated side of the binary builds and secures its very definition through subordination of the Other – the sexually deviant Orient.

What was made visible during the Abu Ghraib scandal may not be as blatant today, yet it is no less relevant. Making sense of people and things by using binaries places a certain values on lives. Such categorising is not harmless: it is interwoven with a certain judgement of whose lives are deemed to be acceptable subjects of violence. The Obama Administration has now ceased to capture “enemy combatants”. According to Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA and later the CIA the strategy is now to kill, not capture: “We take another option, we kill them. Now. I don’t morally oppose that.” [13] Clearly the power relations at work have not really changed.

Why does this matter? Because the construction of binaries makes such violence possible. The animation of such binaries in the military sphere is not disconnected from the way gender is understood domestically. (Notice that the “military” and the “domestic” spheres represent another binary.) In the light of the celebrations of International Women’s Day, we should ask ourselves how the construction of “men” and “women” and its fluidity interplays with the notion of race, and how it creates and maintains artificial hierarchies that underlie and perpetuate the War on Terror.

Caroline Cottet is an MA student in Science and Security at King’s College London.

NOTES

[1] Anne J. Tickner (2002) “Feminist Perspectives on 9/11”, International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 3, p.333–350

[2] Jean Bethke Elshtain (1987) Women and War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

[3] Judith Butler (2008) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Oxon: Routledge

[4] Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry (2007) Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics, London: Zed Books, Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (2005) “Gender Trouble at Abu Ghraib?”, Politics and Gender, Vol 1 (4), p.615, and Marita Gronnvoll (2007) “Gender (In)Visibility at Abu Ghraib”, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Vol. 10 (3), p.375

[5] Barbara Ehrenreich (2004) “What Abu Ghraib Taught Me”, Alter Net, 19 May 2004

[6] Patricia Owens (2010) “Torture, Sex and Military Orientalism”, Third World Quarterly, Volume 31 (7), p.1042 and Meghana Nayak (2006) “Orientalism and ‘Saving’ US State Identity After 9/11”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 8 (1), p.46

[7] In Owens 2010, p.1041

[8] Incidents described in Kaufman-Osborn 2005, Owens 2010 and Laleh Khalili (2010) “Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency”, Review of International Studies, Volume 37 (4), p.1471-1491

[9] Melanie Richter-Montpetit (2014) “Beyond the erotics of Orientalism: Lawfare, torture and the racial–sexual grammars of legitimate suffering”, Security Dialogue, Volume 45, p.43-62

[10] Edward W. Said (1977) Orientalism, London: Penguin

[11] Owens 2010

[12] Ibid.

[13] Michael Hayden, former Director of the NSA (1999-2005) and later of the CIA (2006-2009), quoted in David Kravets (2012) “Former CIA Chief: Obama’s War on Terror Same as Bush’s, But With More Killing”, 9 October 2012 (available at: http://www.wired.com/2012/09/bush-obama-war-on-terror/, last accessed on 12/11/14)

Frustrating anniversaries: International Women's Day and international action on women, peace, and security

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By Melissa Guinan:

Radhika Coomaraswamy, lead author of the Global Study on the Implementation of UNSCR 1325
Radhika Coomaraswamy, lead author of the Global Study on the Implementation of UNSCR 1325

Each year around March 8, International Women’s Day, op-ed pages and Twitter streams burst with celebrations of women’s achievements, calls to action on women’s rights and gender equality. This year, speeches and reports gave a nod to two important anniversaries in 2015: the twentieth anniversary of the 4th World Conference on Women and Beijing Platform for Action, and the fifteenth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), the international agreements that formed the basis of work in gender and security policy. But on a day of rhetoric about the great strides made for women’s rights, we need to take a moment to examine where rhetoric takes the place of action.

In 1995, the 4th World Conference on Women held brought the attention of international leaders to the impact of conflict on women. The resulting Beijing Platform for Action includes a section which affirms that “violations of the human rights of women in situations of armed conflict are violations of the fundamental principles of international human rights and humanitarian law” among an ambitious set of goals on education, poverty, health, and political power. This article will focus on the peace and security aspects of the Platform for Action, which were affirmed with the passage of UNSCR 1325 in 2000. This resolution aimed to mitigate the effects of conflict on women and promote their inclusion in all efforts in peace and security. In the mid-2000s, some governments, often after tireless lobbying from civil society groups, began creating National Action Plans (NAPs) as a way to unify national efforts on women, peace, and security issues.

By the late 2000s it was clear that the diplomatic efforts and NAPs lacked energetic implementation, and the Security Council passed six additional resolutions on women, peace, and security (1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122). Activists worried that each subsequent resolution, accompanied by little substantive change, were only diluting international commitments. They had succeeded in getting the topic on agendas, but was that enough?

Despite many improvements, and the brave work of civil society and involved policymakers, the situation for women around the world falls way behind the hopes of the international community. Women represent less than 4% of the participants in peace negotiations.[1] Twenty-two years after the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, one in three women experience physical or sexual violence, mostly from an intimate partner.[2] Women are underrepresented in the halls of power in security policy and according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, hold only 21.8% of parliamentary seats worldwide.

Activists and gender champions – influential policy makers who understand and promote the nexus between gender equality and safe, thriving societies – work tirelessly in a system where issues of gender equality often remain at the margins, as a paragraph in an international agreement, or a diplomatic statement. Each milestone comes about in an environment where, too often, gender concerns remain “ad hoc, dependent of a few committed individuals or small-scale units. Women are still an afterthought in many instances… the feel-good project to make donors and diplomats look good. A box to be ticked, a meeting to be had, a paragraph to be written.”[3]

Typically, anniversaries are a moment to celebrate or remember. But in this year, advocates and policy makers are holding up past commitments and demanding more. Recently, Executive Director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka wrote:

“Looking today at the slow and patchy progress towards equality, it seems that we were madly ambitious to expect to wipe out in 20 years a regime of gender inequality and outright oppression that had lasted in some cases for thousands of years. Then again – was it really so much to ask? What sort of world is it that condemns half its population to second-class status at best and outright slavery at worst? How much would it really cost to unlock the potential of the world’s women? And how much could have been gained! If world leaders really saw the Beijing Platform for Action as an investment in their countries’ future, why didn’t they follow through?”

Frustration at the inefficacy of efforts for gender quality is logical: international actors are treating at the margins a stated goal that can only be achieved by comprehensive and societal level change. Six structural barriers are impeding arguments and efforts for gender equality, particularly in peace and security issues:

First, it is much easier to give lip service to women’s issues as a public diplomacy project than it is to take action. Governments and policymakers can point to UN resolutions, national action plans, and the diplomatese of “reaffirming,” “recognizing the need,” and “welcoming” action without ever spending the resources and political capital – and while avoiding the inconvenient domestic realities of persistent gender inequality and violence against women.

Second, such a pervasive inequality requires a comprehensive solution, a challenge in any sphere of the policy world. The issues around gender by definition touch on almost everything in society, from sexual and gender based violence to media representation, and from girls’ education to the number of female CEOs. Even in the security field, UNSR 1325 covers the wide range of prevention, protection, participation, and relief and recovery. While the creation of gender advisor positions and pinpointed efforts like the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative are impressive initial efforts, governments are challenged to face broad policy questions with comprehensive answers.

Third, funding challenges plague good faith efforts. According to the OECD Development Assistance Committee’s March 2015 report on UNSCR 1325 implementation, with the exception of the Netherlands, no National Action Plans include commitments to dedicated budget allocations. NATO’s action on UNSCR 1325, which it has stated is a priority, relies on member state donations in a political and fiscal environment in which most allies fail to meet defence spending goals of 2% of GDP. If funding remains ad hoc throughout governments and institutions, so too will action.

Fourth, empirical data lags behind diplomatic efforts. There is growing recognition that “rather than an exercise in political correctness, the integration of gender issues is being recognised as a key to operational effectiveness, local ownership and strengthened oversight,”[4] but only a small collection of quantitative studies exist to help convince sceptics. The academic literature on the issue “remains on the margins of the international security studies field and suffers from the lack of good empirical data” whether because much of the material is “anecdotal and lacks a systemic and analytical focus” or because existing data is not disaggregated by gender.[5] Researchers are actively addressing this problem, but improved data collection and analysis necessarily will take years.

Fifth, gender inequality persists even within societies and institutions working globally for equality. Women are underrepresented at almost all levels of domestic and international security policy making, a crisis of participation felt even more severely by women from the developing world, minority women, and the LGBTQI community. Activists and policy makers face a paradox of how to work within the current foreign policy and national security system to affect change, while understanding that a truly comprehensive approach to gender equality might just transform how policy making is conducted.

Finally, there is no enforcement mechanism to make nations act on any of their commitments for gender equality. Member states are bound to UNSCR 1325 only by Article 25 of the UN Charter, which says that states need to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council. In the peace and security field, normative goals like gender equality will fall behind geostrategic concerns and security crises in a battle for attention, resources, and political capital.

Because of these six structural barriers, policymakers mark another anniversary having made great gains in getting women, peace and security issues on the agenda, but with much still to be done. This year they will again revisit the 1995 and 2000 agreements, with an implementation report on the Beijing Platform for Action released in December 2014 and an upcoming High Level Review to assess implementation of UNSCR 1325. At the September 2014 launch of a Global Study project to support the High Level Review, UN Women’s Mlambo-Ngcuka was hopeful but realistic, stating that “too often, policy gains, rather than real impact, has been our indicator of success. This must change. We must take stock, and ensure that plans are action-oriented and adequately funded. Simply put, we need more results for women and girls.”

Similarly, the key challenge from the frustrating anniversaries of 2015 will be to the international community to decide if it is truly committed to the cause of women and girls and to translate a diplomatically invested norm into real global change. Faced with structural and societal barriers, any action will require significant political investment. As Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström said at a March 3 speech on UNSCR 1325, “ultimately, what it takes is political will. No matter how many documents we sign. If the will to act is not there, we will not move forward.”

Melissa Guinan is a 2014-2015 Fulbright-Schuman Scholar currently in residence at the Institute for European Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in Belgium. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame (USA), and former program officer at The Chicago Council on Global affairs, she is a member of Women in International Security, Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, and Women in War and International Politics (WIWIP) based out of King’s College London. You can follow her on Twitter @MelissaGuinan.

NOTES

[1] GIZ, “Promoting Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations and Peace Processes” (2014) http://www.genderingermandevelopment.net/files/images/Tool%20Kit%20Promoting%20Women%27s%20Participation%20in%20Peace%20Negotiations%20and%20Peace%20Processes.pdf

[2] World Health Organization, “Global and Regional Estimates of Violence against Women” (Geneva, undated) http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/85239/1/9789241564625_eng.pdf

[3] Sanam Anderlini. Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Pub, 2007), 230.

[4] Kristin Valasek, “Security Sector Reform and Gender” (Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, 2008). http://www.osce.org/odihr/30655?download=true

[5] Kathleen Kuehnast, Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, and Helga Hernes, eds. Women and War: Power and Protection in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2011), 2-6.