Sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) have been on the UN’s agenda for more than twenty-five years. Many of the earliest developments took place in the UN human rights mechanisms and Human Rights Council. Increasingly, however, UN agencies, funds, and programs are also integrating SOGIESC into their policy and programming.This paper […]
Read moreWomen‚ Peace and Security
Despite over two decades of policy development and commitments to supporting women and girls affected by armed conflict, women’s participation in all levels of decision-making lags due to structural barriers, lack of access to political arenas, and even threats to women who attempt to participate in these processes. Efforts to build and sustain peace continue to neglect the expertise of local-level women peacebuilders, and formal peacemaking efforts continue to resist women’s meaningful participation and women’s rights.
IPI’s women, peace, and security (WPS) program seeks to build connections between the international community in New York and women and gender experts globally. To advance its goals, the WPS program conducts evidence-based research projects and strategic convenings and maintains global, national, and grassroots relationships and partnerships. In addition to its standalone program, IPI’s WPS team supports the mainstreaming of gender and WPS across the organization’s work.
The WPS program at IPI is focused on the future of the WPS agenda. Rather than only reflecting on the past, it looks ahead at opportunities to expand the WPS agenda and to make it more inclusive in order to reach its linked goals of gender equity and peace and security for all. By using an inclusive definition of “gender,” IPI seeks to move beyond using it as a stand-in for “women.” A broad gender analysis—one that acknowledges the spectrum of masculinities and femininities and how these ways of being affect all aspects of peace and security—ensures that IPI is pursuing an innovative, inclusive, and effective WPS research agenda.
IPI’s WPS program focuses on three main streams of work: (1) gender and peace operations; (2) gendered insights into peace and conflict; and (3) strengthening the WPS agenda and women’s leadership within the UN and among UN member states.
Gender and Peace Operations
UN peace operations will not be successful in building sustainable peace if they continue to marginalize women’s contributions and ignore gender dynamics within the UN and in the contexts where the UN operates.
Since 2019, IPI has analyzed and evaluated challenges and successes in increasing women’s substantive participation in peace operations. Calls to increase the number of women in peace operations (whether peacekeeping operations or special political missions) are increasingly intersecting with expectations of what women will “do” in these operations, covering everything from participation in female engagement teams to mediation. These expectations are, in turn, confronting the challenges women face in the security sector. Research on the unintended consequences of various policy and programmatic interventions, on incentives, and, crucially, on what women in uniform want from these initiatives remains nascent. Likewise, research on gendered definitions of security is lacking, and security concerns—both of host communities and uniformed women themselves—are often narrowly defined and not well addressed.
IPI’s project on gender in peace operations seeks to fill that gap. It builds on the organization’s expertise in UN peace operations and rigorous research to analyze and evaluate challenges and successes in increasing women’s substantive participation in peace operations. By working with the UN, governments, and civil society partners, IPI provides concrete policy guidance on what policies and programs are necessary to substantively improve women’s participation in peace operations.
Gendered Insights into Peace and Conflict
IPI will continue to analyze and evaluate the challenges and successes of the women, peace, and security agenda and offer recommendations on the way forward. IPI’s research on WPS not only examines areas that are already part of the WPS agenda and resolutions but also seeks to identify new intersections between gender, peace, and security. This workstream stems from the belief that using a gender analysis will lead to a better understanding and more effective strategies for building peace and addressing insecurity. An essential component of this workstream includes educating and training others in why and how gender analysis is useful.
As part of this research, IPI considers topics such as masculinities, preventing and countering violent extremism, gender-based violence, the climate crisis and the environment, and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR).
Strengthening the WPS Agenda and Women’s Leadership within the UN and Member States
As the WPS agenda approaches its 25th anniversary (marked by the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1325), it faces challenges in terms of implementation, especially in relation to one of its key pillars: promoting women’s leadership. IPI’s WPS program seeks to strengthen the implementation of the WPS agenda broadly as well as through understanding and working to overcome the barriers to women’s leadership. Dedicated, annual events bringing together key stakeholders and policymakers provide much-needed opportunities to talk through creative and practical solutions to the core challenges facing women, peace, and security. To that end, this workstream focuses on three primary areas: (1) connecting protection and participation; (2) strengthening member-state commitments; and (3) engaging feminist leaders.
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Peacekeeping mission mandates now routinely include language on women, peace, and security (WPS). Despite this progress, negotiations in the Security Council on the inclusion of WPS language in mandates have at times been contested, and it is not always clear that more detailed or “stronger” language on WPS in mandates translates to changes in peacekeeping […]
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On November 16, 17, and 18, IPI and the UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) jointly hosted a series of consultations to explore if and how a focus on masculinities can allow for a more comprehensive approach to integrating gender considerations in counter-terrorism (CT) and countering violent extremism (CVE). The series aimed to […]
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Despite efforts to increase the participation of women uniformed peacekeepers, military women continue to face taboos and stigmas that are barriers to their inclusion and successful deployment. These range from gender stereotypes that cause military women to face more scrutiny than their male counterparts to difficulties speaking up about discriminatory and sexualized behavior, including racism, […]
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“Where a crisis moves in, inclusion moves out, but there is no law of nature governing this,” declared Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde, making the point that although the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to set back the goals of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, it should instead be a factor motivating a redoubled effort to […]
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This year was expected to be an opportunity to assess the past twenty years of progress on the women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda. Instead, it has been upended by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has dominated the international community’s attention and put recent gains for WPS at risk. One of the areas most at risk […]
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As more and more states and organizations adopt a gendered approach to international policy, trainings on how to conduct gender-based analysis and integrate gender perspectives into policies and programming have proliferated. But despite this increase in gender trainings, it remains unclear how effective they have been due to challenges related to their design, delivery, targeting, […]
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Over the past twenty years, UN peace operations have made progress toward gender equality. Most of their mandates refer to women or gender, and the UN and member states have agreed to numerical targets to increase the percentage of women peacekeepers. Meeting, and exceeding, these targets, however, will require the UN to better understand the […]
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On May 27th, the government of Sweden and IPI co-organized their first annual ministerial level discussion on women, peace and leadership. Ministers of the governments of France, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, and Tunisia, as well as a former minister from Yemen met to discuss opportunities for supporting women’s participation in peacebuilding during this time of […]
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On November 21st, IPI and the Normandy Region co-hosted a policy forum on the importance of inclusion and human rights in building lasting, durable, and sustained peace, with a particular emphasis on the importance of women’s participation in peace processes and international mediation.The Normandy Region launched the Normandy for Peace Initiative in 2017, and it […]
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