DIIS Policy Brief

Inclusion is Not Enough to Achieve Gender and Racial Equality in Global Peace and Security

The last twenty years have brought about a significant increase in the awareness of war practices that harm women, including rape and sexual abuse. However, focusing on women alone is not sufficient if gendered and racialised power hierarchies in the civilian and military worlds are to be understood. Experiences from international peacekeeping since 2000 foreground the need for an intersectional lens to examine how systems of power, including gender, race, North-South axes, age, class and religion, co-exist and interact with each other.
African peace keepers
UN Photo/Marco Dormino

RECOMMENDATIONS

The UN and UN member states, in particular
troop-contributing states, should:

  • Shift the focus from numbers of women in the military to making the military’s culture more inclusive and representative and to upholding policies that support diversity and equality.
  • Expand the capacity and skills of peacekeepers on issues of local and global inequalities (i.e., gender, race) through knowledge exchange and in-mission training.
  • Strengthen external mechanisms for addressing issues of sexual exploitation and abuse by and against any military and civilian personnel to ensure justice, accountability and adequate care.
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In January 2021, the Danish Ministry of Defence launched a new plan setting out how Denmark should implement United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 of 2000, which is the cornerstone of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda (WPS). The plan contains concrete steps for incorporating gender and diversity perspectives into the Danish defence forces, ranging from recruitment to solving peace and conflict-related tasks globally. Indeed, the timing is right. As Denmark prepares its candidature for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) from 2025, gender equality has been identified as one of the key priorities in the country’s contribution to global peace. Against this backdrop, how can the Danish contribution to this field avoid previous pitfalls and help to open up a broader space for equality in global peace and security?

Twenty years ago, women’s movements across the world put women and human security on the global peace agenda. With UNSCR 1325, member states committed themselves to mainstreaming a gender perspective into matters of conflict and peacebuilding. While the WPS agenda is sometimes presented as an achievement of the Global North, many countries from the Global South have made contributions to gender equality, and there is now a growing global ownership of this normative agenda.

The WPS’s focus on women’s experience in conflict was an important step in moving away from their invisibility in conflict. The attention of journalists and international courts to war practices that harm women specifically, including rape and sexual abuse, have had enormous significance for public awareness and the sense of justice. However, the past twenty years have also exposed major gaps in the WPS agenda. Focusing on women alone is not sufficient for understanding how practices and values in organisations and cultural contexts reinforce both gendered and racialised power hierarchies in the civilian and military worlds. Experiences from international peacekeeping since 2000 foreground the need for an epistemological and practical shift. To understand the challenges to equality in the global peace agenda, an intersectional lens is needed to examine how multiple systems of power, including gender, race, North-South axes of power, age, class and religion, co-exist and interact with each other.

Women’s ‘added burden’ in international peacekeeping

The nature of international peacekeeping provides an important lens for understanding global structures of inequality and multiple systems of power, especially with respect to gendered and racial relations. Several media exposés of sexual exploitation committed by peacekeepers have drawn international attention to their direct involvement in crimes against civilians in conflict zones. To prevent gender-based violence (GBV) and improve gender equality, there has been an intensified focus on the need to increase the participation of female peacekeepers, given their perceived added value and potential benefits.

As Denmark prepares its candidature for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council from 2025, gender equality has been identified as one of the key priorities in the country’s contribution to global peace.
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International institutions and NGOs have emphasised that an increase in the number of uniformed female peacekeepers will add value such that peace operations will become more efficient and effective.
It is argued that female peacekeepers have a better capacity to engage with women and children in local communities, as they use less violence, can de-escalate tensions and limit incidents of sexual exploitation. However, these assumptions are based on and reinforce gendered stereotypes that convey women as inherently peaceful, communicative and empathetic, which puts pressure on the small minority of female peacekeepers to live up to such expectations. As such, the emphasis on the ‘added value’ of female peacekeepers risks becoming an ‘added burden’ which only female peacekeepers must carry. In addition to contributing to gender inequality, the added burden can feed a backlash against women’s participation because unrealistic expectations on female peacekeepers will not be met.

Female peacekeepers’ additional burdens should be seen in the broader context of the resistance many female military personnel face when trying to participate in overwhelmingly masculine militaries, where masculinity remains the ‘default’ in respect of equipment, training and attitudes. To avoid instrumentalising female peacekeepers’ participation, the focus must be shifted from the women to the context in which they are integrated. This means examining the military culture and environment and recruiting and retaining representative leaders who can mobilise support for a shift to a more open and diverse culture. It also includes making sure that equipment and infrastructure are adapted to all genders, while standards and tests should be made task-specific, thus ensuring that they correspond to the needs in the field, rather than working as measures of exclusion for individuals who do not fit into traditional military culture.
Meanwhile, the fact that over 75% of troop contributions come from Africa and Asia, with African states contributing close to 50% of all peacekeepers, means that this ‘added burden’ falls disproportionately on female peacekeepers from the Global South.

Intersectional lenses on peacekeeping practices: perspectives from the Global South

Moreover, perspectives from the Global South reveal the racialised differences in peacekeepers’ experiences. The concept of a ‘global colour line’ highlights how processes of racialisation are not simply regionally or nationally specific. Rather, the ways in which racial categories and identities have been inscribed in organizational cultures and practices may contribute to the reproduction of colonial and exploitative relations. When looking at specific missions such as the UN Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), it is obvious that the number of deployments, risks and fatalities fall along the global colour line, with 242 deaths from the Global South and 12 from the Global North (see chart). The result is that those who have historically been marginalised along lines of race end up performing the bulk of peacekeeping work.

Graf on fatalities top 10 countries MINUSMA

Since 2000, most fatalities of peacekeepers have been of people from troop-contributing countries that are struggling economically. This global colour line raises questions of which peacekeepers’ lives matter, and why peacekeepers from the Global South are more likely to die in the line of duty.
However, even though peacekeepers from the Global South form the majority of ‘boots on the ground’, there are still unequal power relations at play between peacekeeping missions and target populations. Peacekeepers’ unrecognised positions of privilege have meant that some of the ‘peace-kept’ have been subjected to gender-based violence. Recent legal cases of alleged peacekeeper abuse have been launched in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and the Central African Republic, resulting in the establishment of a separate section of the UN to be responsible for advocating on behalf of victims of sexual exploitation and abuse. However, peacekeeping mandates, programmes and policies typically understand local populations as passive recipients in need of protection and help, rather than as agents and co-participants in post-conflict reconstruction. The UN has often held troop-contributing countries responsible for the actions of peacekeepers. These measures reflect a siloed approach that does not consider the structural inequalities of violence and extraction that enable abuse in conflict settings.

Countries contributing troops to UN peacekeeping
missions, including Denmark, could include intersectional perspectives as part of the required change in the military’s cultural environment.
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Therefore, preventing and addressing sexual exploitation and abuse requires expanding the capacity and skills of peacekeepers to address the racial and gendered power dynamics in which the positions of the ‘peace-kept’ are embedded. It also requires strengthening external mechanisms for monitoring and tracking violations by or against military and civilian personnel.

Ways forward

The UN peacekeeping system is under pressure. The political will to continue investing in peacekeeping missions has diminished. At the same time, criticisms of how UN peacekeeping practices reproduce historical inequalities along the lines of race and gender challenges the legitimacy of the peacekeeping system. While a fundamental transformation in the foreseeable future may be unachievable, a pragmatic approach is still feasible. UN peacekeeping missions, in being made up of national contingents and the military cultures they bring with them, can take small steps in changing everyday organisational practices. UN peacekeeping needs to develop multidirectional knowledge practices that create more space for multiple voices from local communities and that generate military experiences that cut across North/South and regional boundaries. The UN should put in place external mechanisms for monitoring and tracking sexual violations by peacekeepers. Troop-contributing countries, including Denmark, could include intersectional perspectives as part of the required change in the military’s cultural environment. This pragmatic approach also allows small countries like Denmark to walk the talk and take initial steps towards slow long-term progress.

DIIS Experts

Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde
Migration and global order
Senior Researcher
Robin May Schott
Peace and violence
Senior Researcher
Cover for policy brief on gender and peace keeping
Inclusion is Not Enough to Achieve Gender and Racial Equality in Global Peace and Security