Mainstreaming Human Security in Peace Operations and Crisis Management: Policies, Problems, Potentia
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However, the advances of the human security approach and the recent resurgence of interest in human security in the UN are examined to argue that the ideals of human security remain and are active. While this paper uses a simple definition, scholars and policymakers rarely agree on what constitutes human security.
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Khong argued that by prioritizing everything, human security has prioritised nothing due to the difficultly it creates in dealing specific issues. In response to criticism, human security advocates have grouped the original definition into two categories: Whether this is the case will be examined, but firstly this paper deals with framework disagreements stemming from the conceptual difficulties. The essence of R2P is that sovereignty is not a right, but entails responsibilities for States to provide protection and security for their citizens. Where do States intervene first?
What takes precedence, a famine or tsunami? Indeed, a UN initiative to develop regions has been primarily funded only by Japan for over a decade. Implementation of both frameworks by international institutions has, unfortunately, left much to be desired. The current UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, which began in , elucidates many of the problems of human security frameworks in international relations. The results to the framework were mixed. While the Haitian mission was not a complete failure for human security, it did expose its weakness i.
The answer appears to be no. Those who argue otherwise ignore the vast advances made in peacekeeping, thanks to human security such as: The Syrian Crisis and debates over intervention during marked an interesting example of the longevity of human security. In late August and September , Western military strikes were contemplated in response to allege chemical weapons use against civilians near Damascus i.
While negotiations over military intervention were eventually vetoed, the Syrian Regime cooperated with the international community to destroy its chemical weapons. While human security was not invoked as a concept during the Syrian Crisis, its ideals certainly were. This paper proposed that while it could be argued that human security as a concept and framework for practices has largely disappeared from the international agenda, such a viewpoint ignores the work done by various agencies in the name of human security and the relatively recent resurgence of interest in human security.
The reasons for the apparent decline of human security were examined before the paper went on to examine the advances of the human security approach, along with recent resurgence of interest in human security internationally. Post-conflict statistical evidence provided by the UN, shows a rise in parliamentary seats taken by women in areas where peacekeeping and peace-building activities have taken place.
In addition, another positive impact of gender mainstreaming within the UN peacekeeping and peace-building activities is that specific training was provided to the UN peacekeepers, and gender training materials related to the gender implications of the peacekeepers were developed. Despite the fact that the gender-specific policies only focus on certain areas of peace-building, such as in the economic sector or the governmental reform, they have proven beneficial for the population living in postconflict regions.
Nevertheless, in spite of the historical importance of UNSCR , gender mainstreaming within peacekeeping and peace-building activities, while not a failure, has not been an overarching success either. This is because of the lack of clear understanding of the concept not only by the United Nations as an institution but also by the various governments that have tried to implement gender mainstreaming under the UN mandates.
While women are said to be underrepresented at all levels of UN peace support operations, participation is nonetheless increasing. In fact, the UN has recently deployed the first all-female UN peacekeeping force, comprised of Indian policewomen, to Liberia. This deployment sends a strong message: Research shows that women peacekeepers can play a key role in field missions. According to the report, the presence of women:.
In light of this information, several participants noted the need to put more focus on ways to improve gender considerations in policy planning.
Devised by China as a forum to prevent separatism and to confront terrorism and religious extremism, it is at the same time expanding economic relations. The impetus behind CSTO is multiple: The Syrian Crisis and debates over intervention during marked an interesting example of the longevity of human security. For example when gender is mentioned it refers to women in particular and not to both genders. You also may like to try some of these bookshops , which may or may not sell this item. Open to the public.
Women need to be brought into the planning process and need to be part of creating solutions. It has been observed that current mission planning is largely conducted by men. Men also make up the large part of the peacekeepers. Greater female participation at all stages of peacekeeping, from planning to monitor, evaluate and closing of peacekeeping operations was discussed. It was recognized that it is not sufficient to consult with experts in gender before implementing a peacekeeping operation; the voices and recommendations of women need to be incorporated during meetings of stakeholders, meetings between Peacekeeping forces and representatives of development agencies.
Contrary to common belief, women are both victims of and participants in armed conflict. They are also players in the postconflict phase, acting as agents of change. As a result, it is essential to understand the gender dimension of conflict if peacekeeping and peace-building are to succeed in the long-term. The different experiences and impacts are determined by the gender roles and identities of masculinity and femininity in each particular society.
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The Australian Agency for International Development AusAID , in its Gender and Peace-Building Guidelines, says that men are more often combatants, and therefore suffer the majority of fatalities and injuries, but they are not always aggressors; they often play leading roles in peace-building initiatives AAID, Women can also assist children affected by conflict to reintegrate into civilian life.
The role of women is even greater when they are involved during the beginning stages of a peacekeeping mission. Sadly, women are often marginalized from mission planning, peace negotiations, and implementation of peace processes. Gender must be recognized as a vital component of plans and programs to avoid, mitigate and resolve conflict situations, and to build sustainable peace. Doing this involves mainstreaming gender perspectives in all aspects of UN peace operations to ensure that these operations are relevant to all stakeholders involved, responsive to their needs, and effective in the promotion of equality.
The deconstruction of assumptions and roles about men and women would help in the creation of gender sensitive peace building.
The first assumption is that peace building should seek to restore stability and order according to rules and norms that prevailed before conflicts broke out. As Meintjes, Pillay and Turshen affirmed that the return to peace is invariably conceptualized as a return to the gender status quo, irrespective of the nontraditional roles assumed by women during conflict situations.
However, the question is, do women want to return to a pre-war environment that was defined according to the masculine norm of reference and a rigid division of labor that excluded them from public visibility and responsibilities? As we know, war changes gender relations by allowing women toget out of traditional roles and acquire more responsibilities in the absence of men.
Oftentimes, women experiences of war are never taken into account or translated into social gain for a redefinition of gender roles that would be non-oppressive for women and girls in a post-conflict society. Hence Chinkin noted that concepts of reconstruction and rehabilitation may be misnomers in the case of women.
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Both concepts assume an element of going back, restoring to a position or capacity that previously existed. The other assumption, Puechguirbal says, is that changes in gender roles through armed conflicts can only be a temporary disturbance, mainly due to the exceptional circumstances of war and that once peace is brought back, men and women will return to their traditional roles. The problem is that women are under so much pressure to fit into the patriarchal pattern of society reinstalled after war albeit disguised under the rhetoric of human rights. However, women might also feel relieved to return to normalcy after bearing the impact of war.
Women may sometimes feel more confident about themselves after taking over male related jobs, roles and responsibilities or taking up arms and becoming combatants. But are women in a position to uphold this confidence? Puechguirbal follows this with questions that how should one theorize on the post-war disappearance of women apparent new independence and confidence?
Do independence and confidence, in fact, disappear? Or is it a matter of relief from wartime burdens? Is there a reversion to norms that had apparently changed but that, in fact, had only been suspended? Hale writes about Eritrean women who took an active part in the revolutionary war against Ethiopia in the s as combatants. She says that at the same time that combatants were conducting social, economic and political transformations in the liberated areas, the remaining part of the society continued to live according to local tradition and culture, unaffected by the impact of the revolution on gender roles.
She stresses that, in a way, we could say that civilian Eritrean society was frozen during the war. As a consequence, female combatants who had experienced more equitable gender roles at the front were confronted with a very complex reinsertion into a very conservative society that did not evolve at the same pace Hale, An additional problem regarding the participation of women in peace processes is that very often the same male actors who used to be combatants are currently sitting at the peace negotiation table as acceptable peace makers.
The same men in different clothes are the ones who are going to define the status of women in the post-conflict environment with the blessing of the international community. Puechguirbal has noted that the role of males in post-conflict processes is influenced by their experiences during the war through a very firm definition of gender roles. As heroic mothers, women are often used in the nationalistic discourse to emphasize the ideological conquest of the nation: It is highly probable that women will be ordered to focus on their reproductive role to replenish the nation with sons at the end of the war.
On the other hand, as victims of war, women as victims in need of protection cannot at the same time are viewed as confident actors in a peace process. This is another way of excluding women from the peace process as they are made to believe that they are weak, vulnerable and incapable of articulating their own needs. Additionally, women themselves may not be conscious of the changes that happened in gender roles during a conflict in such a way that they would understand them as empowering. Women have been taking on heightened roles as trouble-makers, like in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where women belonging to the Women Network for the Defense of Rights and Peace, organized in the eastern part of the country to request their participation in the peace process Puechguirbal, They received threats from the local rebel group, which accused them of destabilizing the town.
Their office was ransacked many times, and peaceful demonstrations were systematically said to have been interrupted by the rebels for security reasons Puechguirbal, Or are they just a threat to male power holders? Certainly, in this case women cannot be seen as active agents of change for peace who have the potential to challenge the male power. Conflict is a state or situation that is devoid of peace. What is Conflict resolution? It is conceptualized as the methods and processes involved in facilitating the peaceful ending of conflict. The term conflict resolution may also be used interchangeably with dispute resolution, where arbitration and litigation processes are critically involved Miller, Furthermore, the concept of conflict resolution can be thought to encompass the use of nonviolent resistance measures by conflicted parties in an attempt to promote effective resolution.
Often, committed group members attempt to resolve group conflicts by actively communicating information about their conflicting motives or ideologies to the rest of the group e. Ultimately, a wide range of methods and procedures for addressing conflict exist, including but not limited to, negotiation, mediation, diplomacy, and creative peace building. It should be noted therefore, that conflicts have different causes, levels of intensity and stages of violence.
Women and men do not neatly fit into homogenous groups. The same holds true for peace-building activities: There is no doubt that much hope is put into international organizations cooperating with local organizations when it comes to preventing and resolving conflict. Horrendous events such as the genocide in Rwanda as well as the wars in the Balkans at the beginning of the 's should not be allowed to reoccur. One single organization alone cannot guarantee peace in the world today.
There are many ways of looking at international organizations and their role in the international system. Those with a distinct state-centric view of the world would argue that international organizations only are as strong as states allow them to be, while others would argue that states are not the only important actors, and that international organizations indeed have an important role in international relations.
Nonetheless most scholars and politicians would agree that international organizations have increasingly become important within the areas of peace and security. Today international organizations such as the United Nations UN and the European Union EU have developed an increasing arsenal of instruments — political, military, economic and civilian — to act within these areas, and their role is only becoming bigger.
This development, which began in the s, should be seen in light of the sharp increase in international efforts and interests in confining and ending conflicts on the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield. That said, more so than ever before the UN is sharing the international scene with many different regional actors, who all require or prefer a UN mandate for their missions and operations. The peaceful resolution of the conflict between Nigeria and Cameroon over the oilrich Bakassi Peninsula by the UN through its organ — the International Court of Justice, is a classic example of conflict resolution by an international organization.
In the last decade, a common security and defense policy has developed from a distant dream to joint action. The EU has conducted over 23 military missions on three different continents and is gradually emerging as a security provider on the international scene, contributing with strategic visions and soft conflict-management instruments. It has 28 members spanning two continents and is currently engaged in operations on two continents.
Ever since the founding of the African Union AU , there has been a significant gap between its declarations of intent and its actual activities and accomplishments. Africa is one of the most conflict-ridden regions of the world, with many African states having little or no control over their own territories. It can therefore be seen as somewhat bizarre that something like the AU exists at all. Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe OSCE , the regional security organization for Europe and most of the northern hemisphere, comprises 55 participating states.
Despite its large membership, it is not as well-known as other international organizations and has not been as significant either, due to the fact that other organizations and their member states prefer other institutional settings for their multilateral activities.
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However, during the Cold War, its predecessor, the CSCE, was an important factor in stabilizing East-West rivalry by adding elements of joint commitment and collaboration to a conflictridden relationship. Devised by China as a forum to prevent separatism and to confront terrorism and religious extremism, it is at the same time expanding economic relations. Collective Security Treaty Organization CSTO is a political and military alliance comprised of seven countries, its mission being to guarantee the security of each of its member states and the defense of their territorial integrity.
The impetus behind CSTO is multiple: This is a peace building process whereby the parties in conflict have lost total control over the outcome and their situation than when mediation is adopted. In arbitration, the arbiter is the decision-making authority. Outcomes of intervention are binding because they are legally based. Process of conflict transformation.
This process focuses on going beyond conflict resolution to building long lasting peace relationship in a post conflict situation. In other word, it seeks to reframe the positions of the conflict parties. A process in which parties tend to work together on their own for the purpose of peace building through dialogue, planning and executing common projects. It is a process in which parties in conflict systematically engage in dialogue to resolve the issue in question. This is a voluntary intervention by a third party, which is informal and non-binding on the parties.
In this process, the mediator seeks to facilitate the process of peace building through mediation. This is a peace promotion mechanism that involves the use of law court. In this approach, the judge is the decision-making authority. The outcome is binding on the parties in conflict. When personal conflict leads to frustration and loss of efficiency, counseling may prove to be a helpful antidote.
This refers to parties working together on their own accord so that peace building can be attained through dialogue and planning, and to execute common projects. It is a process in which a third party intervenes in conflict. In this process, the conciliator is expected to communicate with the concerned parties separately with the aim to persuading them to embrace peace. Apart from the approaches mentioned above, other peace promotion mechanism that gender and international organizations can employ in peace-building and conflict resolution include the use of peacekeeping operations, fact-finding missions, debates, diplomacy, representation, observer status, etc.
Taking up a gender approach in peacekeeping and peace building recognizes that only through changing social relations and institutional practices may gender equality emerge. The approach to gender mainstreaming comprises the integration of a gender perspective into the analyses and formulation of all policies, programs and projects; and initiatives to enable women as well as men to formulate and express their views and to participate in decision-making processes as it effects the attainment of peace in human society.
Understanding the role of gender peacekeeping and peace building also implies that each conflict should be understood in its own uniqueness. Hence, conflicts have different causes, levels of intensity and stages of violence. The same holds true for peacebuilding activities: Therefore, some suggestions become necessary here. That is, building the capacity of women as well as the men will therefore strengthen their role in conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peace building as well as increase their knowledge and skills in the ways and means by which their views can be expressed or shared to build a culture of peace in their communities.
Has Human Security Disappeared from the International Agenda?
In addition, there should be gender training for peacekeeping and peace building personnel to serve as an important strategy for facilitating and enhancing the operational effectiveness of peacekeeping and peace support missions. Consequently, gender training should be prioritized by multiple actors working at various levels on peacekeeping and peace building issues. Furthermore, machinery should be set in motion to create systems that will encourage greater gender involvement in policy planning of peace operations and planning of missions.
This could be achieved by ensuring, to the extent possible, that there are an equal number of women and men planning missions at the UN level; demanding that women and men have equal representation at the table when peace negotiations are happening; and ensuring that women and men are awarded delegate status and provided with the necessary resources enabling them to come as equals in international platforms. All Published work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. Visit for more related articles at Global Journal of Research and Review.
Keywords Gender, Peace building, Peacekeeping. Introduction The intention of this treatise is to show the relevance of gender balancing, especially the inputs of women in the pursuance of global peace.
Conceptual understanding of gender Gender is a socially defined pattern of roles, rights, responsibilities, entitlements, and obligations of females and males in societies [4,5]. Conceptual understanding of peace, peacekeeping and peace building peace The peace is from the Latin word, pax meaning "freedom from civil disorder," the English equivalent came into use in various personal greetings from about as a translation of the Hebrew shalom. Peace-building [14,15] Peace-building is a term that describes the interventions that are designed to prevent the start or resumption of violent conflict by creating a sustainable peace.
Peacekeeping On the other hand, Peacekeeping can be defined as the active upholding of a peace between countries or communities, especially by an international military force [17]. Nexus between peacekeeping and peacebuilding Peace-building involve s a range of measures targeted at reducing the risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict by strengthening national capacities at all levels for conflict management, and to lay the foundation for sustainable p e ace and development.
Gender mainstreaming and peace-building process What is gender mainstreaming? According to the report, the presence of women: Improves access and support for local women; b. Facilitates communication with victims of assault, sexual abuse, violence, etc. Can provide a greater sense of security to local populations women and children ; d. Helps create a safer environment for women in which they are not afraid to talk; e. Makes male peacekeepers more reflective and responsible; f. Broadens the repertoire of skills and styles available within a mission; and g. Can help to reduce conflict and confrontation.
Gender Role in Peacekeeping and Peace building Contrary to common belief, women are both victims of and participants in armed conflict. Role of international organization in conflict resolution Conflict is a state or situation that is devoid of peace. Concluding remark Taking up a gender approach in peacekeeping and peace building recognizes that only through changing social relations and institutional practices may gender equality emerge. Women, Peace and Security Resolution International Feminist Journal of Politics , 6 1 , Peace and Conflict Management Studies in Africa. Ambrose Alli University, ch.
The Continuum of Violence: A Gender Perspective on War and Peace. Gender and Conflict Zones. University of California Press.
Mainstreaming Gender in Global Governance. An Analytical Framework for Policymakers. Gender, Peacebuilding and Reconstruction. Conflict Prevention and Management in Nigeria: The Role of the Christian Religion. Enwisdomization Journal, 4 3 , Mainstreaming, and the Engendering of Policy —Making: A Means to an End? Journal of European Public Policy , 7 3 ,