Training the troops on gender: the making of a transnational practice

Over the past two decades, the international Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has established a commitment to increase the participation of women in matters of peace and security, to ensure the protection of women's rights, and to include gender perspectives in conflict prevention. The WPS agenda foresees a number of measures to make peacekeeping more gender-responsive, including training uniformed peacekeepers on gender. These policy commitments date back to the year 2000, and have instigated the development of training materials and the institutionalization of training at regional and national levels. This article examines these training mandates, asking: What is the scope and nature of gender training for peacekeepers? How is gender understood to operate in peacekeeping? A review of international and national policy commitments demonstrates that training uniformed peacekeepers on gender has become a significant transnational practice. An examination of these mandates and training guidance reveals that training discourse establishes a normative understanding of gender that is focused primarily on vulnerability to sexual violence, and that frames gender as a question of skills and capacities rather than political investments or moral values. However, differences in localization demonstrate that gender training could be and sometimes is understood more expansively

Gender experts and critical friends: research in relations of proximity

Research on gender expertise is often conducted from relations of proximity between academics and gender experts, raising familiar feminist methodological questions about the researcher–researched relationship. In this article, I take up the suggestion that such relationships should be guided by the principles of 'critical friendship'. I argue that critical friendship should be understood as a two-way relationship that creates space to negotiate the goals of gender expertise and how it is practised. I also caution that relations of critical friendship may cause researchers to privilege the perspectives of Global North gender experts in academic analyses, while silencing other voices

Saving the world, one gender training at a time

The Elsie Initiative is a multilateral pilot project that uses the Measuring Opportunities for Women in Peace Operations (MOWIP) methodology to research barriers to and opportunities for women’s meaningful participation in peace operations in seven pilot countries. A comparative analysis of data from MOWIP reports, as well as their primary findings, inform this policy brief series. This policy brief is about how troop- and police-contributing countries (TPCCs) can leverage gender training, as one part of broader institutional transformation processes, to enhance women’s meaningful participation in peace operations2 and to develop truly gender-responsive peacekeeping

The WPS agenda and the 'refugee crisis': missing connections and missed opportunities in Europe

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has successfully constructed the figure of the conflict-affected woman as a subject worthy of attention, inclusion and protection on the part of the international community. This concern is especially palpable when she is physically present in a conflict zone. As the conflict-affected woman flees and seeks safety and security in Europe, however, she moves to the periphery of the area of concern of WPS policies and discourses. In this working paper, we demonstrate that forcibly displaced persons skirt the margins of the WPS agenda: refugees are present in WPS policies, but as the subjects of marginal and inconsistent concern. We interrogate the effects of this marginalisation, and suggest that including refugee questions in WPS policymaking and scholarship carries the potential to improve security provision for those who have fled to Europe, as well as to revive the transformative potential of the WPS agend

Women, peace and security after Europe's 'refugee crisis'

Since its inception in 2000, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has conceptualised the conflict-Affected woman as a subject worthy of international attention, protection, and inclusion. In the wake of Europe's 'refugee crisis', this article examines how the remit of WPS has broadened from women in conflict zones to refugees in Europe's borderlands. A minority of European states now attend, in their WPS policy, to these conflict-Affected women on the move. This inclusion productively challenges established notions of where conflict-Affectedness is located. It exposes Europe as not always peaceful and safe for women, especially refugees who flee war. Conversely, the dominant tendency to exclude refugees from European WPS policy is built on a fantasy of Europe as peaceful and secure for women, which legitimises the fortressing of Europe and obscures European states' complicity in fuelling insecurity at their borders, cultivating an ethos of coloniality around the WPS agenda. The inclusion of refugees is no panacea to these problems. If focused solely on protection, it repositions European states as protective heroes and conflict-Affected women as helpless victims. The WPS framework nonetheless emphasises conflict-Affected women's participation in decision-making and conflict prevention, opening space for recognising the refugee women as political actors

WPS as evolving and contested terrain: a review of new directions

In the WPS agenda’s twentieth anniversary year, New Directions brings academics, practitioners and activists into conversation in a book that demonstrates the evolutionary breadth and depth of WPS policy and scholarship. In the introduction to the volume, Soumita Basu, Paul Kirby and Laura Shepherd sketch the contours of the WPS agenda as something broader than the text of the policy frameworks that United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 instigated. They characterise the agenda as the focal point of a WPS community and as a site of political investments, demands and disavowals. The editors position the book in the “new politics of WPS…in relation to geographical, temporal and institutional scales” (p. 2) and map, as much as can be done, the trajectory of WPS in scholarly and policy fields: beginning as a feminist activist agenda at the margins of international security, to a policy agenda ingratiated in the ‘masculine’ space of the Security Council, to an agenda that is diffused outside of the politics of the Security Council in local and other institutional spaces (pp. 5-6)

Women and Peacekeeping: Time for the UN to Commit to Gender Equality

UN peacekeepers are deployed to make local populations more safe and secure. They must not be allowed to become another source of insecurity for the people they are sent to serve. Christine Chinkin, Marsha Henry and Aiko Holvikivi on the need for the new UN Secretary-General to commit to gender equality in order to ensure that peacekeeping lives up to its promise

About that march on Saturday 21st

An international march was organised by feminist groups across 20 countries last Saturday, 21st of January, following the election of Trump as the president of the United States. This march gathered an important diversity of organisations, making thousands of people unite around the world in protest to Trump’s election, in defence of woman’s rights, and against discourses of hate and racism. Here are the reasons why some of us attended the march, in London and Paris

Fixing gender: the paradoxical politics of peacekeeper training

Over the past two decades, gender training for military and police peacekeepers has become institutionalised in the global governance of peace and security. Such training purports to respond to gendered harms previously ignored in, or actively caused by, peacekeeping operations. This evolving transnational practice involves the introduction of gender knowledge – indebted to feminist theorising and activism – into police and military organisations – commonly characterised as institutions of hegemonic masculinity. This thesis takes the tension between feminism and martial institutions as its point of departure to investigate what meaning the term gender acquires in training for uniformed peacekeepers, asking: What epistemic and political work does gender training do in martial institutions? Investigating the pedagogical practices of gender training through a multi-sited ethnography, I approach this question with the help of feminist, postcolonial, (and) queer epistemic perspectives. I conceptualise gender training as involving the production of knowledges around gender; knowledges which enable ways of being and acting in the world. I suggest that training practices often produce an understanding of gender that serves martial politics and reproduces colonial logics in the peacekeeping enterprise, thereby emptying the term of the transformative political hopes that feminist theorists typically invest in the concept. At the same time, I identify moments of tension, in which gender training appears to be destabilising hierarchical martial logics and engaging in subversive pedagogy. In sum, I argue that ambivalence is an integral feature of gender training, and locate political potential in the cultivation of resistant pedagogies, which exploit the margins of hegemonic discourses to engage in subversive strategies of destabilisation and delinking. This thesis provides an empirical contribution to an under-studied area of global governance, as well as forwarding feminist theorising on political strategies for engaging with and against institutions of state power