Opportunities for Linking Women, Peace and Security to the US Department of Energy

In October 2000, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS). To date, more than half (107) of all United Nations member states have adopted National Action Plans to address the experiences of women and girls in conflict and their security needs as required by the resolution. The United States is among them, with the US Department of Defense, US Department of State, US Agency for International Development, and US Department of Homeland Security each issuing their own implementation plans for WPS. Importantly, the US Department of Energy (DOE), and most especially, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), despite having much to offer on the implementation of WPS, has been noticeably absent in this policy space. In this article, we lay out the opportunities that exist for DOE and NNSA to implement WPS. First, we present an analysis of what states around the world have included in their National Action Plans with regard to energy, nuclear, and environmental policies as these are most closely related to the work of DOE. Then, we consider opportunities for DOE to build upon these links by adopting practices toward gender balancing (i.e., increasing the inclusion of women) and gender mainstreaming (i.e., assessing the influence of gender on policy outcomes). By adopting gender balancing and gender mainstreaming practices, DOE can affect the inclusion of women within its institutions and the lived experiences of women outside of them

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Few systematic studies of U.S. uses of force treat the inherent attributes of presidents as the key causal factors; nonetheless, the fact that individual leaders matter is evident to the public, the media, and foreign policy makers in other countries. This study advances the development of first-image explanations of conflict by empirically investigating the relationship between presidential personality and the variation surrounding foreign policy decision making. The importance of this type of variance has been understudied in international relations (Braumoeller 2006), and the consistency of leaders’ policy decisions has important strategic implications for interstate conflict (Reed 2003; Clark and Nordstrom 2005; Allen 2008; Clark, Nordstrom and Reed 2008). Relying on Big Five measures of U.S. presidents’ personality traits, we find that leaders who have a high tendency towards Excitement Seeking are more likely to use force to carry out their foreign policy objectives, while those who are more Open to Action exhibit a greater variance around their foreign policy decision making. In sum, the personality traits of individual leaders not only influence the choices they make, but the consistency of their choices, which has important consequences for U.S. foreign policy