Framed in the language of peace (making, keeping, building), the United Nations military interventions of the 1990s have spawned feminist demands for participation, together with critiques of the sexist and gendered practices that have characterized these missions. In Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping, 14 scholar-practitioners relay their observations of the way in which gender politics pervades UN peace missions and postconflict reconstruction.
The volume is divided into four sections. The first provides overviews of issues relating to women and conflict and on gender mainstreaming, the second focuses on international law and gender-based violence, the third looks at peacekeeping operations through a feminist lens, and the last explores postwar reconstruction. The authors examine politics at UN headquarters and in peacekeeping missions in Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Rwanda, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Kosovo, Haiti, Guatemala, East Timor, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.
Gender mainstreaming, that is, the UN's stated commitment to taking into consideration the differential impacts on women and men of various organizational practices, is at the center of this collection. Angela Raven-Roberts describes the development of policies and concept notes, of training and gender focal points in the UN's humanitarian, human rights, and security regimes. She finds a range of constraints, including lack of conceptual coherence, little commitment from senior management, resistance among male staff, the underrepresentation of women, and a marginalization of those tasked with implementing gender mainstreaming. This negative picture is not uniform, however, and the contributors to this book show that successes have been possible.
Recounting her experiences in developing and field-testing a gender training program for peacekeeping personnel, Angela Mackay describes highly problematic responses but also breakthroughs, such as an East Timorese police school graduate (a woman) gaining the vocabulary to talk about her own experience of assault with her colleagues. In Namibia, Louise Olsson argues, gender-aware leadership made possible the unbiased recruitment of mission staff. Whereas the military component of the Namibia mission was male dominated, the civilian staff was 40% female, and the mission helped lay the groundwork for the continued promotion of women's rights after independence.
The activism of women in the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO) was crucial for the inclusion of women's concerns in Namibian postwar reconstruction, and indeed various chapters in this collection agree on the importance of an active women's movement. Ruth Jacobson found that in Mozambique, women activists shone a spotlight on peacekeepers' demands for sex and questioned demobilization plans that gave benefits to combatants and their families. Because combatants often had multiple wives and the UN assumed monogamy, many women went empty-handed. Although the UN learned from its mistakes in this country, the lessons did not carry over to the mission in Angola. There, the UN encountered similar circumstances but in the absence of a vocal feminist movement, gender issues were ignored. For Guatemala, Ilja A. Luciak and Cecilia Olmos attribute the strong guarantees of gender equality in the peace accords to women's activism, although success turned into disappointment when it came to implementation.
In addition to active women's movements and gender mainstreaming, international law has become another instrument for feminist purposes in the context of international peace operations. Valerie Oosterveld describes the strengthening of international legal mechanisms for prosecuting gender-based crimes in the 1990s. Case law and the statutes of war crimes tribunals (including the International Criminal Court) have developed definitions of rape and consent, and demanded gender-sensitive court procedures and staffing, all of which constitutes a significant advance for women. On the other hand, as Barbara Bedont shows, the current legal regime for peacekeeping missions has led to a situation of impunity, because the prosecution of crimes committed by peacekeepers is left to contributing states. Perpetrators are rarely held accountable, and victims of crimes have no legal recourse. Bedont suggests giving secondary jurisdiction to the host state so that local courts can become active if the legal system in the contributing countries fails the victims.
The increasingly common employment of private security forces for peacekeeping operations escalates the problem of impunity even further. Valerie Hudson describes the lack of accountability among mercenaries in Africa, and Martina Vandenberg the legal void surrounding U.S. military contractors in the Balkans. Unlike soldiers, these contractors are not subject to the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice, and were not prosecuted for their involvement in sex trafficking in the Balkans. Similarly, U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over police officers who are serving abroad in peace-building missions.
How is one to theorize these experiences with UN peace operations from a feminist perspective? Dyan Mazurana portrays peacekeeping and peace building as embedded in the masculinist practices of national and international elites and, citing Mark Duffield, as contributing to the construction of “emerging forms of protection, authority, and rights to wealth” (p. 34). Zoë Wilson, in her discussion of Angola, concurs: Peacemaking is state making, a key element of which is “the solidification and legitimization of the power of military belligerents” (p. 251), that is, of men in military organizations, rather than women in community and civic organizations. Cynthia Enloe, in her concluding chapter, employs an old-fashioned, but clearly still relevant concept to describe this form of state: “The big picture,” she argues, is patriarchy.
This volume then is about the struggle to undermine the reestablishment of patriarchy during and after conflict, taking conflict as an opportunity for a new beginning—as Tracy Fitzsimmons puts it in her exploration of the creation of new police forces in Haiti and Kosovo. The difficulty of this project is amply illustrated in the various chapters and perhaps most painfully in the chapter on Rwanda. Here, women have become the “leaders for peace,” the force in which both the international community and the national government have put its hope. Women's organizations provide a range of services, and women-only elections have created women's committees with considerable influence throughout the polity. But the politics of Rwanda are not those of a feminist state. As Erin Baines shows, “universal woman” here has become both the symbol of unity and a force for suppressing difference. There is a taboo concerning the naming of ethnic groups and a “dark veil of silence and a deep fear” (p. 232) that prevent people from articulating ethnic inequalities. Woman has become a means for silencing dissention.
Mainstreaming gender into UN peace operations is perhaps one of the most ambitious feminist projects currently under way. Not surprisingly, changing institutions entails contradictions, co-optations, and unanticipated outcomes—and changing security institutions perhaps even more so. This collection does justice to the complexity of the micropolitics of change. It is a fascinating read and highly recommended.
