Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping with Sabrina Karim

Before 2016, US foreign policy looked much different than it does today. Upon her confirmation as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton moved US foreign policy towards advocating for women's, rights and equality. In a WAPPP seminar, Sabrina Karim argues that while these actions weren't necessarily a feminist foreign policy, they did put gender equality on the frontlines, not only as an issue of development, but as one of peace and security.

The UN’s Resolution 1325 “Women, Peace, and Security” also affirmed the important role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peace-building, peacekeeping, humanitarian response, and in post-conflict reconstruction. Moreover, the Resolution stresses the importance of women’s equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security.

The Resolution also applies to the UN’s peacekeeping missions. A peacekeeping mission is a negotiated settlement, where UN forces are deployed to provide security, and peacebuilding support post-conflict. The UN cites peacekeeping to be one of the most effective tools to help countries return from conflict to peace. Peacekeepers are composed of civilians, soldiers, and police officers. It is other developing countries that provide the military, and these countries often profit from sending their soldiers because the UN pays more than what the soldiers would have made in their home countries.

With her award-winning book Equal Opportunity Peacekeeping; Women, Peace, and Security in a Post-Conflict States, co-authored with Kyle Beardsley, Professor Karim finds that there are many gender inequalities that exist within peacekeeping missions.

Question:

To begin her research Professor Karim asks “To what extent have peacekeeping missions achieved gender equality in operations and been vehicles for promoting gender equality in post-conflict countries?”

To answer that she looks at multiple ways in which gender inequality could take place in peacekeeping missions, specifically she asks:

1. Are there women included as peacekeepers?
2. Are the peacekeepers perpetrators of abuse?
3. Are there specific protections against wartime sexual violence?

To answer her first question, Professor Karim analyzes years of data from the UN’s peacekeeping missions. She finds that after passing Resolution 1325 the UN had set a goal of having 10% women for the military peacekeepers, and 20% for the police peacekeepers, by 2014, almost 15 years later, they had not met that goal. The highest proportion of women peacekeepers existed in missions in Cyprus and Nepal, and even these countries did not reach 8%.

Many scholars would agree that including women in peacekeeping missions would lead to better outcomes. The presence of female peacekeepers helps reduce conflict and confrontation. In addition, it helps women and children feel safer, improves access and support for local women, and makes peacekeepers more approachable to women. However, women who are included often face structural inequities that prevent them from doing their work as peacekeepers.

Problem 1

Women in peacekeeping missions have more informal work assigned to them, than do their male counterparts.

Women in peacekeeping missions are subject to implicit bias that often pushes them towards gendered work within peacekeeping, rather than providing security. All peacekeepers engage in community activities, not formally, but in addition to their work in providing security. However, women peacekeepers, including all female units are more likely to be recognized for facilitating community activities.

In addition, it is often up to the female peacekeepers to police behavior of male counterparts. This presents a whole set of barriers, as it is difficult for women to report inappropriate behavior because it might pose some issues to their future and careers as peacekeepers. Professor Karim argues that it is these unfair burdens and expectations upon female peacekeepers, which set them up for failure.

Problem 2

Women Peacekeepers are often assigned ‘safer’ placements than their male counterparts.

Although women peacekeepers are supposed to provide security, they are also vulnerable to gendered violence, and require their own protections. As such, safety, security, and cultural factors are all taken into consideration before assigning women to placements. Women tend to be deployed to safer missions, specifically to countries with lower rates of sexual violence. Sabrina Karim argues that if employing women peacekeepers is supposed to decrease sexual violence, it is difficult to do that if they are not assigned to the appropriate missions.

Problem 3

Peacekeepers are often perpetrators of sexual exploitation, abuse, and violence.

Professor Karim notes that of the 50% of the women she interviewed who had engaged in transactional sex, 30% of them had engaged in transactional sex with a peacekeeper. She also notes that the presence of a peacekeeping mission led to an increase in an adolescent’s girl’s first time engagement in transactional sex.

Although the UN collects data on military and police peacekeepers, civilian peacekeepers are private citizens so the UN does not collect or release data about them specifically. It is also nearly impossible for local people to report sexual assault perpetrated by the peacekeepers to the UN. However, some reports note that civilian peacekeepers are more capable than either military of police perpetrators.

Establishing a Culture of Gender Equality:

Professor Karim provides many insights and recommendations to address the current issues present in peacekeeping:

1. Mission leadership: Choosing leaders who value gender equality may have a trickle-down effect. Professor Karim recommends using performance on gender equality as a prerequisite for leadership recruitment on peacekeeping missions.
2. Promotion and Demotion: Incentivize gender equality within peacekeeping missions.
3. Role Models and Mentors: Establish a network of role models for women in peacekeeping roles.
4. Training and Professionalism: Peacekeepers receive 2-3 hours of training on gender and sexual abuse and exploitation. Professor Karim recommends expanding these trainings and having the facilitator be someone serving in leadership. 

Want National Security? Focus on Women's Safety: A Discussion of the Hillary Doctrine

In the last seminar of the academic year, WAPPP welcomed Valerie Hudson to discuss research explored in her latest book, The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy. Hudson, the George H. W. Bush Chair of The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, is well known for her work on bare branches, the theory that violence is increasingly caused by skewed sex ratios within a society. She has long argued that the security of women is vital to the security of the nation, which - though largely accepted now - was considered a revolutionary concept at the time.

Research for the book began in 2010, and the content was largely written in 2013, after Hudson's co-author Patricia Leidl completed fieldwork in several countries. Hudson emphasized the role that qualitative data played in their research. Data on cultural norms, customs, practices and laws were missing from the current research, so Hudson and Leidl created a massive database to fill this niche.

One might wonder why the idea that women's security affects national security is called the Hillary Doctrine. Hudson explains that though Clinton was the third female Secretary of State, she was the first woman in that role who made women’s issue priorities for the Department. The book, though not about Secretary Clinton herself, explores the effects that her belief in this idea has had on American foreign policy.

Source: Associated Press

The book is presented in three parts. The first focuses on the history of how women came to matter in American foreign policy, starting with the Nixon administration. Hudson explained that Ambassador Swanee Hunt, who wrote the book's foreword, was instrumental in informing this portion of the research.

The second section focuses on the theory and cases that explore whether the Hillary Doctrine is justified. Hudson argues that her past research reveals the doctrine is in fact based on a solid premise. She presents the theoretical argument for what she terms fempolitik, arguing that the realization that women’s security is closely linked to national security is a pillar of clear-eyed realpolitik. She argues that male-female relationships are a foundational issue, while poverty, explosive violence, ill health and other widespread problems are the macro consequences of women's insecurity.

The third and last section of the book focuses on the implementation of the Hillary Doctrine from 2009-2013. Jen Klein, advisor to Secretary Clinton on global women’s issues, explained in an interview for the book that the State Department adopted four initial principles to guide their work on women. These principles stated that their work (1) would be non-partisan, (2) would not impose U.S. views or laws on others (indeed, the policies focused on the agenda enshrined in CEDAW, which the U.S. has not ratified), (3) must be based in evidence, even though the Department also thought it was the right thing to do, and (4) must demonstrate that the benefits created by such policies also apply to national security, not just women’s security. Though these principles were paired with strategic frameworks from major government organizations, Hudson explained that the disconnect between high-level policy and the actual work on the ground manifested itself in a fairly predictable fashion, citing some terribly ineffective initiatives.

Hudson closed by sharing some of the top items off the book’s “to do” list. These included using the bully pulpit to discuss women's issues, developing hard targets and performance benchmarks on women's inclusion, focusing on male accountability, and adding a jus ex bello element to the just war theory, one that focuses on the harms after war has ended that disproportionately affect women. She also emphasized the importance of Presidential will to work on this issue, quickly adding, “depending on who is elected the next President, maybe we won’t have a problem in the will department.”