Gender, Peace and Disarmament

Today's wars are no longer fought on the discrete battle zones of the First World War. The new battlefronts include homes and communities, in wars waged over resources, political power and in the name of religion and ethnicity. And violence against women, once an unfortunate side-effect, is now a deliberate part of many of these armed conflicts. The United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, adopted in October 2000, has called attention to the fact that women and men are affected by war and armed conflict in different ways. The debate on that resolution and its follow up have also brought into sharper focus the enormous potential contribution of women as stakeholders of peace, disarmament and conflict prevention. The result has been a greater awareness of the gender dimensions of conflict and post-conflict situations throughout the international community.

But why focus on gender at all in this context? Gender refers to the differential social roles that define women and men in a specific cultural context—and to the power relationships that perpetuate these roles. A focus on gender not only reveals information about women's experience, which otherwise can be hidden, it also sheds light on ingrained assumptions and stereotypes about men and women, the values and qualities associated with each and the ways power relationships can change. In this article I will look at women's experience of armed conflict, focusing particularly on their roles in conflict prevention and disarmament and the ways in which the United Nations is working to integrate a gender perspective into all of its conflict prevention and disarmament activities. As Executive Director of UNIFEM I have witnessed the impact of conflict on women in many countries. I have been to Bosnia where women described abduction, rape camps and forced impregnation, and to Rwanda where women had been gang raped and purposely infected with HIV/ AIDS. In the ‘Valley of Widows' in Colombia, I met women who had lost their husbands and their land; everyone and everything important to them had been destroyed by the violence of civil war and drug lords. Stories like these have been repeated again and again, in different languages, in different surroundings: East Timor, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala. Only the horror and the pain were the same.

In his recent book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, British journalist Chris Hedges observes, ‘The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary.' The experience of violence and loss he describes is further compounded for women as they are rarely the primary architects or decision-makers in war making. To be sure, women have often embraced war as necessary for national or communal security, and some have been willing participants. But while women are sometimes complicit in war, they are almost completely absent in the decisions to go to war—or in the appropriation of funds that make weapons and war possible. And what I have seen over and over is that women overwhelmingly regard the conflicts they have lived through as futile, unnecessary and preventable.

The women's movement has consistently criticized the equation between national security and military security, noting the failure of military violence to achieve its stated aims, and arguing that the full complexity of its costs are often overlooked.Moreover, in addition to the enormous economic implications, there are also powerful cultural and ideological processes that perpetuate militarism. The cultural and social status that accrues to male warriors, martyrs and protectors has no similar parallel for women, at least not until recently. The back-breaking work that women take on to keep societies going when men go to war is typically trivialized as ‘keeping the home fires burning'. Even women combatants are rarely accorded the same treatment as their male counterparts. In post-conflict training packages and reintegration services, for example, it is generally the mothers of martyrs and the wives of fallen warriors that, through their relationship to a male hero, are given social sympathy and occasionally some economic support.

Despite the leadership they exercise at the community level, women are not prominent in the political parties that emerge when armed groups lay down their weapons, just as they are rarely represented in the leadership of existing parties, or in the security apparatus of states throughout the world. If women are not participating at the national level, there are fewer possibilities at the international level because international representatives are chosen from the national pool. Only two women have served on the Security Council since 1992, out of a total of eighty-eight ambassadors serving in that capacity. And only 5.4% of ambassadors sent to represent countries at United Nations Headquarters since 1992 have been women. From 1945, when the United Nations was established, to 2000, when Security Council resolution 1325 was passed, only four women served as Special Representatives of the Secretary-General (SRSG)—in-theatre heads of mission—in peacekeeping operations. At the time of this watershed resolution, affirming the essential role that women have in peace and security matters, there were no women holding the position. Almost three years later, only one woman serves as a SRSG, and four women serve as Deputy SRSGs.

Despite the lack of women represented in the global peace and security apparatuses, the United Nations has recognized the importance of addressing the gender dimension of conflict and peacebuilding and the need to involve women fully in this process. The theme for each of the four United Nations World Conferences on Women has been ‘equality, development and peace', providing an opportunity for women activists to organize and advocate around the issues of disarmament, peace and security. The final document of the Third World Conference on Women, held in 1985 at the height of the Cold War, is particularly rich on these subjects. The Beijing Platform for Action, adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, contains a whole chapter on women and armed conflict, including the issues of landmines, military spending and the urgency of halting all nuclear test explosions. The Beijing Declaration recognized ‘the leading role that women have played in the peace movement, work[ing] actively towards general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control, and support[ing] negotiations on the conclusion, without delay, of a universal and multilaterally and effectively verifiable comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty which contributes to nuclear disarmament and the prevention of the proliferation of nuclear weapons in all its aspects'— a role reaffirmed in 1998 by the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

The method by which Member States have chosen to implement gender considerations in peace and development activities is known as ‘gender mainstreaming', which is defined as ‘… the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in any area and at all levels. It is a strategy for making the concerns and experiences of women as well as of men an integral part of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres, so that women and men benefit equally, and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal of mainstreaming is to achieve gender equality.'

The goal of gender mainstreaming is to avoid making gender an ‘add-on' by insisting that every aspect of a given activity, such as peace or disarmament negotiations or postconflict operations, be assessed for its gender implications. The process requires persistent effort, including regular monitoring, reporting, follow-up training, and evaluation of progress made and obstacles encountered, as well as systems for holding the operation/organization accountable for achieving its goals. All of this requires resources and, above all, political will at all levels. Despite occasional success stories, too often gender equality is considered a ‘soft issue', with the result that attention and resources are inadequate.