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Beyond Women, Peace, and Security: Gender and Peacebuilding

Jordan Stevenson — Sun, 08 Mar 2020 12:00:38 +0000

Have you ever thought about how peace actually comes about? If you’ve taken a history class, you’re probably familiar with the concept of peace treaties. The peace treaty, which is a legally binding document, is a tool of diplomacy that ends conflict between two or more parties, usually governments at war. These documents are incredibly important; they often set terms of surrender, in which parties may or may not agree to give up arms, acknowledge atrocities, cease certain attacks, settle debts incurred prior to or during the conflict, release prisoners, pay reparations, and possibly create structures that will inform the relationship going forward, such as an annexation of territory or alliance.

Peace is not simply a nebulous value. It is also a state of existence. It is an everyday experience for some, and a future experience to hope for, for many. When STAND and other organizations advocate for resolving conflict and creating peace, we are not simply advocating for the principle of peacefulness, but a change in the status quo for hundreds of millions of individuals around the world. One way that this is achieved is through peace treaties. These documents can have significant impacts on the resulting life for civilians. However, not all peace is created equal. The best peace treaties repair harm, reconcile atrocities, and provide a sustainable framework to continue a state of peace amongst all parties forever (or at least for the foreseeable future).

This is where the issue of gender becomes especially important. Conflict often disproportionately impacts women and girls in certain ways due to the use of sexual violence or kidnapping as a weapon of genocide or war. Certain peace treaties may provide better reparations for gender-based violence perpetrated during conflict than others, could potentially ignore the impact of war on women, fail to release women prisoners of war, or even fall apart without the assent of women.

Those “possibilities” are reality, and largely due to the lack of women involved in the treaty-writing process. According to UN Women, “between 1992 and 2018, women constituted 13% of negotiators, 3% of mediators and only 4% of signatories in major peace processes tracked by the Council on Foreign Relations.” This is unacceptable. Not only is it exclusionary and oppressive to women, it also does not set the foundation for sustainable peace. Research shows that peace treaties and agreements are more likely to create durable peace if women participate, and “peace agreements signed by women show a higher number of agreement provisions aimed at political reform and a higher implementation rate of these provisions” (UN Women).

So, how do we ensure that women’s voices are heard in peacemaking and peacebuilding processes? The United Nations’ original gender-aware peace policy, Resolution 1325, establishes a framework to measure, promote, and address the unique impacts of conflict and mass atrocities on women and to increase women’s participation in peace. This policy also helped create the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, which countries around the world, including the United States, have since formalized. This agenda has helped provide funding for women peacebuilders, codify the issues that women face in conflict settings, and train women on issues of peace and conflict resolution, so they can enjoy their womanhood and be fulfilled women and even study about sex and fatigue and more . Of course, there is more work to be done, beyond what the Women, Peace, and Security agenda has accomplished.

One important aspect we have to acknowledge is gender diversity; although the Women, Peace, and Security agenda has promoted women’s rights, it often utilizes narrowly defined terms of gender identity and expression. Unfortunately, the issues faced by gender non-conforming, non-binary, and transgender folks have been “largely absent from gender and peacebuilding research, policy and programming” and require further research (International Alert). Going forward, it is necessary to integrate gender-inclusive terminology in peacebuilding, not only to benefit folks of diverse gender identities, but to promote human rights and normalize these issues in international society.

The participatory aspect of peace negotiations is another important element to consider, especially the capacity for substantive participation from women and other gender identities. A major barrier to women’s participation in peace processes is that gender-diverse people all over the world face barriers to literacy, education, and job training that would help prepare them to formulate the documents and negotiate agreements for peace. It is not enough to simply add more women to the peace delegations and negotiating teams, but the international community must equip them with the tools necessary to make change. Increasing the proportion of gender-diverse individuals who are specifically trained as legal professionals, such as lawyers or paralegals, can help prepare societies to face peace processes with more gender diversity.

Finally, a key to promoting gender inclusivity and substantive participation in peace is the prevention and resolution of gender-based violence in conflict. It is vitally important that all human rights, peace, and foreign policy organizations continue to recognize the role that gender-based violence plays in conflict, and advocate to end impunity in cases of sexual violence, prosecute offenders, or create other non-legal transitional justice apparati to resolve the pain and trauma caused by this violence.

What can we do to help? The first step is to educate yourself. Visit the resources listed below to learn more about the role of gender in peacebuilding. The second step is to support and promote gender-diverse lawyers, encouraging women and gender-diverse folks to pursue law training in the context of peace. For the United States, this means passing policy to help fund programs that train women lawyers and paralegals all over the world–and domestically. It means holding perpetrators of sexual violence accountable and supporting survivors of sexual violence with resources and access to justice. Finally, it means creating a gender-diverse world by using individuals’ correct pronouns, advocating for diverse perspectives on gender, using more inclusive language, and creating institutions to support and protect gender identity.

Today is International Women’s Day! In honor of this international celebration, please enjoy this blog, and feel free to share it on social media.

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Jordan Stevenson is a senior at Eastern Washington University, where she is majoring in International Affairs with a concentration in Global Public Policy, and minoring in Economics and Spanish. As an MC member, she co-leads STAND’s State Advocacy Lead program, communications operations, and policy process. Prior to joining STAND, Jordan served as a Global Youth Advocacy Fellow for Planned Parenthood, lobbied for women’s rights and U.S. foreign policy with Population Connection, and researched Indonesian political rights with the U.N. Development Programme. She currently works on campus at the Institute for Public Policy & Economic Analysis, is an LGBTQ Policy intern with GLIFAA, and does economic development work in Kenya with Partnering for Progress.

Adding Nuance to the Peace vs. Justice Debate

Sonia Sen — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:01:07 +0000

This piece, written by Danny Hirschel-Burns, from Swarthmore College STAND, originally appeared on his blog The Widening Lens.

The peace versus justice debate is unavoidable when it comes to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The conversation goes something like: Team Peace argues that the immediate cessation of violent conflict has to take precedence over everything else, while Team Justice argues that ending impunity for human rights violations is crucial for deterrence against human rights violations in the future. While this summary totally simplifies a complicated and multipolar conversation, these two camps shape the basic nature of the debate. Though both have solid points, a messy, subjective truth lies somewhere in the middle and the effects of justice are heavily dependent on the specific situation.

While the division between peace and justice is not rock-solid, there are indeed real problems with pursuing justice over peace (a theme I’ve written about before). A perfect example is Sudan. The ICC’s arrest warrant against President Omar al-Bashir increases his need to stay in a position of power (though he says he will step down in 2015 this is probably more of a result of internal NCP politics and he certainly has no intention of handing himself over to the ICC), and has decreased his ability to participate in negotiations. This fact decreases the possible avenues of engagement for the international community (to varying degrees depending on the actor) to bargain with Bashir, ultimately hampering the opportunities for an international tempering influence, which his is especially unfortunate given Bashir’s current position of weakness.

Another example of unintended ICC consequences is in Kenya, where ICC-charged duo Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto were essentially brought together as a political unitbecause of their respective warrants that date back to the election violence in 2007-2008. Ruto and Kenyatta were able to use their confrontation with the ICC as a symbol of their resistance against foreign influence, consequently gaining them votes. Their ticket eventually won the Kenyan elections (though there seems to also be evidence that the ICC helped convince Kenyatta and Ruto to call for calm before and after the election), and Kenyatta is now the second head of state to have been summoned by the ICC. Unlike Bashir however, Kenyatta has cooperated with The Hague thus far.

So while there are real downsides to justice over peace, there are also plenty of benefits from a justice-centered approach. As Erik Voeten points out in his Monkey Cage post, the ICC is very effective in deterring human rights abuses in countries where “mid-level” human rights abuses take place. Also, the ICC is quite good at influencing mid-level individuals. While Bashir, as Sudan’s leader, is out of the ICC’s reach, mid-level individuals in security forces and rebel groups worldwide are much more expendable, and they know that if a higher-up decides they’re a liability because of the atrocities they’ve committed, they’ll be on the next plane to The Hague. The threat of ICC prosecution, for example, had a positive effect in Colombia, and the institution is quite effective at deterring torture.

Unfortunately though, the existence of the ICC does little to deter the most egregious human rights violations. Individuals like Assad, Bashir, and Gaddafi have never been cowed by threats of eventual justice. Keeping power outweighs any potential risks. Conversely though, the existence of the ICC does not encourage human rights violations as James Fearson argued. While it is supposed to, the ICC does not really close off all escape routes (they’ve never been in short supply anyway) for human rights violators, but these escape routes, in the end, have little effect on the level of human rights violations committed. It is not as if Assad is being encouraged to kill as many people as possible before escaping to the ICC; leaders like Assad and Gaddafi never had any intention of pulling the escape cord when it looked like they have a credible chance of losing. While the ICC can do little to prevent leaders bent on maintaining power through any means necessary from doing so, it can at least provide a just conclusion to some of these cases (Bosco Ntaganda is a good example), an outcome which shouldn’t be trivialized.

Justice and peace and not mutual exclusive phenomena, and while one can sometimes endanger the other, the specific context of each situation must always be taken into account before making a policy recommendation. Ultimately, this is a debate that the ICC will have to enter to an increasing degree in coming years. While it has made some progress, it must to do more to address the problems that come with an inflexible, justice-centered approach. Luckily, it does have the tools to do that. Article 53 of the Rome Statute, the founding document of the ICC, allows for the Chief Prosecutor to offer amnesty to a perpetrator in the interests of the victims. This precedent should not be applied in every situation, but does potentially allow the ICC to take a more critical approach to its activities. The ICC has certainly been a milestone achievement in the fight to end international impunity for large-scale human rights violations, but it is not without its problems.