Female peacekeepers, community engagement and effectiveness of peace operations

Women’s peacebuilding initiatives have a long history. However, only relatively recently, in 2000, were the roles of women in peace and security recognized by the United Nations Security Council: via Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS). This resolution shows the recognition of the disproportionate effects that conflicts have on women and reaffirms the important role of women in conflict prevention and resolution, peace negotiations, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, humanitarian response, and post-conflict reconstruction. It stresses the importance of women’s equal participation and full involvement in all efforts to maintain and promote peace and security. After 1325, the UN Security Council adopted nine follow-up resolutions over the years, and states developed National Action Plans (NAPs) to implement the WPS agenda. The WPS agenda is composed of four key pillars: prevention of sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflicts and by peacekeepers, participation of women in peace processes, protection of women’s rights during and after conflict, relief & recovery including gender perspectives and equal distribution. The WPS agenda is considered the most significant international initiative to change international security practices related to feminist goals. However, looking back at two decades after the adoption of resolution 1325, the implementation is slow. Focusing on the second pillar of WPS, the latest numbers of women in multilateral peace operations shows that this is still very low: 5.9 % of the military personnel of UN peace operations are women. Although the role of gender has become more often part of International Relations, the latest Peacekeeping literature focuses on the mechanism of how peace operations actually work on the ground. The literature on the Local Turn in Peacekeeping is a major shift in focus from top-down international peacebuilders to local people as the most important drivers of peace. Feminist International Relations provides useful perspectives on the role of women in security, such as broadening the level of analysis (including the personal), broadening the notion of security (including human security), and pointing at the underrepresented women in both IR research and IR practice. This paper will argue that the research on the mechanisms of peacekeeping could be expanded by including gender and local perspectives into the analysis of workings of operations on the ground. It will show that it is worthwhile to study the relationship between gender, community engagement, and operational effectiveness of peacekeeping missions. Operational effectiveness is usually measured by negative peace, such as decreasing battle-related deaths. Instead, this paper will argue for a focus on positive peace, which could be considered as local experiences of everyday peace and security feelings near the home, as a more fruitful way to investigate women’s agency in security.