Carol Harrington. International Feminist Journal of Politics. Volume 13, Issue 4, December 2011.
Introduction
In October 2000, the unanimous passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 linked gender, peace and security and recognized the need to ‘mainstream a gender perspective in peacekeeping operations’ (UNSC 2000). The Resolution authorizes monitoring of peacekeeping operations by gender experts and condemns military sexual violence. As a policy artifact this Resolution gives evidence of startling tensions in the gender politics of mainstream international security discourse in the final years of the twentieth century. How did ‘gender’ and ‘violence against women’ become mainstream security issues at this particular point in history? What does Resolution 1325 signify about feminist capacity to intervene in questions of international security?
Social movement theorists have answered such questions with celebratory accounts of how feminist activists inside and outside United Nations (UN) institutions managed to get the problem of violence against women onto the international security agenda. They argue that activists’ success in influencing international security discourse depended upon the leadership of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ and their formation of a ‘transnational advocacy network’ of insiders and outsiders that framed violence against women as a human rights issue. Moreover, a number of feminist scholars have argued that the intrinsic nature of the problem of violence against women as a violation of female bodily integrity forged unity in the previously divided field of women’s organizations active around the UN.
This article argues that such accounts fail to analyze how the collapse of the Soviet Union transformed discourse on both ‘women’ and ‘human rights’ as problems for international government. In the post-Cold War order the USA poses as leader of the democratic world and defender of women and children against brutal men who instigate ‘new wars’ characterized by mass rape. Since its foundation, women’s politics in the UN system formed a terrain of superpower struggle: the Soviet argument that the problem of ‘women’s oppression’ should be located within a broader analysis of international political economy attracted many women’s organizations active in the UN. Consequently, representatives from mainstream US women’s organizations often felt isolated from other women’s groups while US officials tended to view women’s politics with suspicion. Thus, the sudden unity forged in the post-Cold War UN field of women’s politics owes less to the intrinsic properties of the violence against women issue than to a sudden absence of superpower conflict. Furthermore, the significance of the human rights frame for the success of the international feminist campaign on violence against women only makes sense when considered in the context of broader transformations in security discourse which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to security experts, the ‘new wars’ of the post-Cold War era require new forms of peacekeeping that include attention to women’s rights, particularly violence against women. Ironically, these new forms of peacekeeping create environments in which sexual violence, abuse and exploitation flourish. Resolution 1325 speaks to these tensions within contemporary peacekeeping operations, proposing the technical solution of gender mainstreaming.
Transnational Feminist Networks
Scholarly accounts of how and why violence against women made it onto the mainstream security agenda build upon social movement theory to highlight transnational activists’ agency in bringing about change globally and locally. Social movement analysts use the concepts of ‘political opportunities’, ‘mobilizing structures’ and ‘framing’ to explain both the achievements and failures of social reform efforts (Joachim 2003: 247). Keck and Sikkink combine social network analysis with the social movement approach to show how ‘transnational advocacy networks’ have achieved reform by working simultaneously at the international, national and local levels. They define ‘transnational advocacy networks’ as ‘those relevant actors working internationally on an issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse and dense exchanges of information and services’ (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 2).
One of Keck and Sikkink’s case studies analyzes how ‘violence against women’ came onto the international security agenda through the efforts of women active in the UN and women’s NGOs who held organizing meetings and events at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University. In 1989, when she became founding director of the Center, Charlotte Bunch decided that, given the increasing importance of ‘the human rights concept’ to international politics, women needed to ‘claim it and be in on it’ (Bunch quoted in Friedman 1995: 25). She held a meeting of activists who agreed that violence against women would be the best point of intersection between feminism and human rights discourse as it was:
[t]he issue which most parallels a human rights paradigm and yet is excluded. You can see in violence all the things the human rights community already says it’s against: it involves slavery, it involves situations of torture, it involves terrorism, it involves a whole series of things that the human rights community is already committed to [fighting, but which] have never been defined in terms of women’s lives. (Bunch quoted in Friedman 1995: 20)
The Center for Women’s Global Leadership’s location at Rutgers made it possible to gather women from all over the world located in the New York area and active in the UN or in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that worked with the UN. As Jacqui True emphasizes, transnational advocacy networks’ capacity to achieve change within major global governing institutions depends upon their fostering of ‘alliances of [institutional] insiders and outsiders’, such alliances ‘work within the system with institutional actors and as a part of larger policy communities to bring about incremental change’ (True 2008: 7). Thus, transnational advocacy networks constitute a form of elite women’s politics closely integrated into the UN system.
Valentine Moghadam argues that changes in the global economy since the 1980s favored the formation of transnational feminist networks in particular, which she calls ‘structures organized above the national level that unite women from three or more countries around a common agenda, such as women’s human rights, reproductive health and rights, violence against women, peace and antimilitarism, or feminist economics’ (Moghadam 2005: 4). Moghadam’s concept of transnational feminist network covers a wider range of political actors than Keck and Sikkink’s concept of transnational advocacy networks, which work for change in the mainstream institutions of international government. However, like Keck and Sikkink, she argues that the increased salience of gender in international politics reflects increased global unity among women activists. In her account, the impetus for women’s global unity increased from the mid-1980s because of three related factors: the decline of the welfare state in rich countries, a new international division of labor that relied on cheap female workers and the emergence of patriarchal fundamentalist movements (Moghadam 2005: 19). She also points to new information technologies that allow transnational networks to ‘retain flexibility, adaptability and nonhierarchical features’ (Moghadam 2005: 17). Although Moghadam pays attention to global structural changes and their significance for driving international unity among women’s organizations, she does not mention the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Women active on ‘women’s issues’ in UN conferences, organizations and debates had typically divided over the political questions of the day along North/South or along Cold War lines, over nationalist questions and over the question of Israel/Palestine. At the UN women’s conferences in Mexico (1975) and Copenhagen (1980) women delegates from poor countries accused those from wealthy countries of focusing too much on sexuality and legal equality rather than economic and political questions (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 170; Moghadam 2005: 5). Keck and Sikkink emphasize the role of political leadership in forging unity in a divided movement (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 184-8; also, Joachim 2003; Carpenter 2007). They discuss feminist leader Charlotte Bunch as an example of a ‘global moral entrepreneur’, who cleverly framed various grievances women had about bodily violation as ‘violence against women’ and a human rights problem (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 184 -5). They contend that Bunch’s astute linkage of human rights with violence against women highlighted common experiences and interests of women from rich and poor countries and bridged the North- South divide (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 195-8). They also argue that the reason women in the UN more readily united on violence, rather than other issues ‘is intrinsic to the issue itself’ since it concerns ‘the preservation of human dignity’ and ‘bodily integrity’ (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 195).
The activities of the Global Center for Women’s Leadership certainly made a difference to production of information on violence against women. In 1989, Bunch gave a speech to Amnesty International about gender and human rights which provided a catalyst for Amnesty to begin investigating women’s rights and sexual violence as specific human rights concerns. Similarly, the Center worked with Human Rights Watch on a women’s rights project which began documenting sexual violence in the sex industry, against refugees and during conflict (Harrington 2010: 122-3). The feminist entry into mainstream human rights organizations transformed the discourse and activities of those organizations, turning their machineries to documenting women’s experience of violence. Interventions planned by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at the UN Human Rights conference in Vienna in 1993 and the Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995 helped consolidate the slogan ‘women’s rights are human rights’, echoed in the name of an Amnesty International publication which came out that same year (Amnesty International 1995b).
Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) account assumes a UN context in which human rights discourse provides a master frame which feminists could appropriate (see also Joachim 2003: 259; Carpenter 2007: 101). Yet violence against women became a mainstream international issue at the very same time as human rights increased in salience at the UN. Joachim (2003) argued that the fall of the Soviet Union allowed the USA to assume global leadership in the cause of violence against women, but fails to address why the USA had never championed this issue in the international arena before. Nor does she question why the Soviets, who had previously advocated gender equality and opposed sexual violence and harassment, had not brought this issue to the international table. The following section considers how bipolar Cold War politics shaped feminist discourse at the UN and kept the problem of violence against women off the international agenda.
Women’s Politics at the UN During the Cold War
I argue that Cold War politics and the end of the Cold War profoundly affected which issues women could speak with authority on as women at the UN. Cold War politics exacerbated the North/South divisions that other authors have considered a barrier to unified action among women’s organizations active in the UN. These divisions isolated mainstream US women’s organizations and government officials from more radical and socialist feminist groups internationally and in their own country. While vibrant feminist anti-sexual violence politics developed outside the Soviet sphere during the 1970s, Cold War politics kept such questions off the international women’s agenda at the UN.
The UN incorporated a separate women’s bureaucracy providing official sanction of the notion that some international issues counted as ‘women’s issues’ and fuelling superpower intervention in international women’s politics. As the Cold War intensified following the founding of the UN, the UN Status of Women Commission provided ‘a testing group of the respective programs and achievements of eastern and western attitudes’, according to one US observer (Frieda Miller to the US Office of International Labor Affairs quoted in Laville 2002: 114). The UN made provision for NGOs to seek ‘consultative status’, which gave them access to UN debates and resources. Thus women’s NGOs emerged with the specific goal of intervening at the UN. Such NGOs became sites of active intervention by agents of the USA and the Soviets. After the Second World War, communist women of the French Resistance had called a women’s conference which founded the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). The Soviet Union supported this new international women’s organization, supporting its access to UN consultative status and using it as an opportunity to propagate the socialist program for women’s liberation (Weigand 2001: 46-64).
Socialist commitment to gender equality and analysis of the connections between sexism and capitalism intrigued many feminists, although few outside the socialist bloc accepted the Soviet Union’s claim to have ended women’s oppression. Nevertheless, such intellectual interest in communism meant that even anti-communist feminists in the USA came under investigation and suspicion during the McCarthy era (Weigand 2001; Laville 2002: 102-11). Walt Disney testified to the House Committee on UN-American Activities that the League of Women Voters was a communist front, although a few days later when he checked his documents he apologized and said he actually meant the League of Women Shoppers. In similar confusion, League of Women Voters activist Anna Lord Strauss often found herself confused with communist activist Anna Louise Strong. The American WIDF affiliate, which included leading international activists such as Susan B. Anthony (Jr), had to close in 1950 after being forced to register as ‘subversive’ (Laville 2002: 105). Meanwhile, the US branch of the International Alliance of Women disassociated from the international organization in 1950, having expressed dissatisfaction with its ‘feminist angle’ since the end of the war: in the US ‘feminism’ was too akin to socialism (Laville 2002: 56 -9, 200).
Both the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) found allies in American women’s organizations, anti-communist leaders of which eagerly impressed upon US officials the dangers of Soviet influence in the international women’s organizations (Laville 2002: 114). In the early 1950s, concerned about Soviet hegemony over ‘the women question’, the CIA secretly sponsored the ‘Committee of Correspondence’, an organization of patriotic American women which held international conferences to ‘emphasize the favorable position of women in the free world’ as compared to that under communism (Committee memorandum quoted in Laville 2002: 175). However, the Committee’s efforts did not meet with much success. A member admitted that on a trip to Europe she ‘felt at once a certain distrust and resentment of our communications. The criticisms were too much US propaganda, too obvious a campaign against the USSR’ while on a trip to Japan she found women there ‘agreed with our European friends that US propaganda was just as abhorrent to them as Communist propaganda’ (quoted in Laville 2002: 178, 188). In 1967, media revelations broke about covert CIA activity in NGOs including women’s NGOs, discrediting American women’s organizations (Agee 1975; Willetts 1996: 33 -43, 41-2; Laville 2002: 171-92).
Championing women’s rights was one of the ways the Soviets intervened in developing countries. Their linkage of ‘the woman question’ with problems of capitalism, imperialism and racism attracted large national women’s organizations in poor countries (Ghodsee 2010: 5-6). In the early 1960s, the Soviets successfully argued at the Status of Women’s Commission that women’s full integration into economic development would eliminate discrimination and inequality. In 1970, the Assistant Director responsible for the Commission on the Status of Women noted it had ‘recast its programme of work giving less emphasis to “rights” and more to the “roles” of women’ (Margaret Bruce in Connors 1996: 158). This approach embedded questions of women’s status in an analysis of economic relationships and broader political economy. The ‘women and development’ issue area formed the main focus of the Women’s Commission and expanding international women’s bureaucracy in the 1970s and 1980s. UNIFEM launched in 1976 and funded burgeoning numbers of women’s NGOs to implement women and development projects. The question of ‘women’ became so firmly linked with economic development in the UN that the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), although technically a human rights instrument, found its home with the Center for Social Development and Humanitarian Affairs in Vienna rather than the UN’s human rights offices in Geneva (Berkovitch 1999: 142).
Thus until the end of the twentieth century, UN debates about women’s status revolved around a critique of capitalism. According to Leticia Ramos Shahini, who served on the UN Women’s Commission during the decade on women from 1975 to 1985: ‘A constant topic of debate in the commission between those who came from the East and their Western counterparts was the superiority of women’s status in the Socialist bloc as against the advantages of women in market oriented economies’ (Shahini 2004: 28). A delegate from communist Romania proposed the idea that the UN host a women’s world conference in 1975, which Mexico volunteered to host and the Soviets threw themselves behind (Ghodsee 2010: 5). They wanted the conference to be a forum where women could debate neo-colonialism, capitalism, apartheid, racism, Zionism and poverty. The USA wanted to limit the agenda to questions of women’s legal equality in education, politics and so forth, fearing ‘antiAmerican speeches and resolutions’ (Ghodsee 2010: 5). As Kristen Ghodsee points out, in the year of USA withdrawal from Vietnam, Article 29 of the Mexico women’s conference document reads like a critique of US military intervention in states turning to communism:
Peace requires that women as well as men should reject any type of intervention in the domestic affairs of States, whether it be openly or covertly carried on by other States or by transnational corporations. Peace also requires that women as well as men should also promote respect for the sovereign right of a State to establish its own economic, social and political system without undergoing political and economic pressures or coercion of any type. (United Nations 1975: Article 29)
The Soviet position on this, and economic questions, appealed to many women from countries in the developing world which had grievances against the USA.
Thus international women’s politics remained a difficult arena for US intervention during the Cold War. The isolation of US feminists at the 1975 conference was not helped by a dictate from the State Department that the US delegation at the official conference should not speak to women from the Eastern Bloc, even informally (Ghodsee 2010: 5-6). After the Soviets again led resolutions at the 1980 international Women’s Conference in Copenhagen condemning Zionism as racism and praising centrally planned economies for their achievements in advancing women’s participation in economic development and public life, US government representatives put extra effort into their preparation for the 1985 Nairobi conference (Ghodsee 2010: 7-9). They worked hard to keep questions of Zionism, racism and socialism off the agenda in Nairobi, providing financial assistance to Kenya for the costs of hosting the conference and appointing the president’s daughter, Maureen Reagan, as one of the US delegates. US delegates at the official conference managed to keep the word Zionism out of the final conference document, but could not forestall resolutions and debates over the links between capitalism, imperialism and women’s oppression (Ghodsee 2010: 8-9).
During the UN decade on women, international women’s organizations rarely discussed sexual violence as an issue for the UN and the final documents of these three conferences do not highlight it. In March 1975 Diane Russell along with other anti-sexual violence feminists organized an International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels involving 2,000 women from forty countries as a counteraction to the 1975 UN Conference in Mexico, in which superpower politicking had dominated (Joachim 2003: 255-6). The CEDAW, another project of the UN women’s bureaucracy, failed to explicitly address questions of sexual violence or violence against women, although the text underwent wide discussion by international women’s NGOs before finalization. While communist countries supported women’s economic advancement and participation in public life they did not back feminist attempts to politicize violence against women or sexual violence at the UN. Formerly, the Soviets opposed sexual violence and exploitation as a manifestation of capitalist oppression. The Bolsheviks had linked public and private sexual violence and exploitation, criminalizing both workplace sexual harassment and rape within marriage as early as 1922 (Attwood 1997: 100; Juviler 1977: 245). Nevertheless, by the 1970s and 1980s when feminists in the non-communist world started mobilizing around sexual violence, communists tended to dismiss such concerns as ‘bourgeois’, peripheral to the more ‘fundamental’ class struggle (Boxer 2007). Feminist anti-sexual violence politics only had an impact on domestic politics and policy outside the communist world. Protesters against the Vietnam War and against US bases in Japan, Korea and the Philippines condemned military sexual violence. Feminists also analyzed the links between the growth of sex tourism to Asia and the presence of US military bases (Brownmiller 1975; Enloe 1988; Moon 1997: 34 -5, 47). Yet these political issues never made it onto the mainstream ‘women’s’ agenda at the UN. Women’s organizations could get little traction on questions of violence against women or sexual violence in the UN system. When a women’s legal group put forward a proposal to study forced prostitution, the Commission on the Status of Women cautioned them that the UN did not want to pursue that issue (Barry 1979: 65). The Soviets and ‘Third World’ nations opposed investigations into forced prostitution as a kind of Western imperialist monitoring and argued that apartheid in South Africa presented a more serious instance of modern slavery (Barry 1979: 63). Women’s organizations in the UN attempted to get a resolution at the UN General Assembly in 1985 condemning violence against women, which did not pass until reformulated as ‘domestic violence’ (Pietila and Vickers 1996: 143).
International women’s NGOs and women’s bureaucracies in the UN had few resources or political support to document or politicize sexual violence during the Cold War. The human rights NGOs and activists did sometimes document rape alongside other forms of torture, but did not develop a gendered analysis of human rights violations. Thus, in 1971, rapes committed by Pakistani soldiers of Bengali women in Bangladesh only got attention from international feminists as an issue of abortion rights, since the topics of unwanted children and family planning fit into the development field where women’s organizations had a voice (Brownmiller 1975: 80). The fields of human rights and security provided no such space for women to speak as women, and made no response to the rapes. In the late 1970s the Indonesian army’s mass rapes of women and girls in East Timor barely registered in the UN system, although human rights monitors did record these rapes along with other atrocities (Chomsky and Herman 1979: 166). The Soviets did not use sexual violence as an issue with which to attack US foreign intervention. In the 1980s, neither Soviet women’s leaders nor UN NGOs raised sexual violence issues as relevant when the USA supported the patriarchal Afghan Mujahideen against a modernizing regime which promoted women’s rights (Moghadam 2005: 45). Nor did the US or pro-US feminists seek to expose Soviet hypocrisy on women’s issues. They could have pointed out, for instance, that the USSR purported to defend the rights of Afghan women while members of the Red Army used prostitutes and perpetrated rapes during the conflict, and that Soviet women who served in the armed forces suffered sexual harassment and violence (Galeotti 2001: 4 -2, 72).
Yet following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA emerged not only as a global hegemon, but posed as champion in fighting violence against women. Joachim’s argument that ‘the US government assumed leadership on the issue [of violence against women]’ because of domestic feminist lobbying and because it ‘fit the world views and beliefs of the Clinton administration which was generally supportive of women’s issues’ (Joachim 2003: 259) neglects to analyze how the issue fit with the US security agenda in the post-Cold War era. The question remains as to why only after 1989 ‘trafficking in women’, wartime rape and domestic violence became important to the women’s sector of the UN under US global hegemony. The following section argues that violence against women emerged as an international security issue after the Cold War because of its framing within new wars discourse as a reason for international policing and surveillance. In this context Resolution 1325 passed as a response to the tension produced by embedding opposition to violence against women within the militarized projects of political and economic transformation which characterize the new wars.
Violence Against Women and Us Global Hegemony
International policing of sexual violence forms part of the global democratic policing stance adopted by the USA and its allies since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reorientation of global security discourse. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) security analysts criminalize their military targets in the post-Cold War order with ‘new wars’ doctrine, which pits alliances of democratic state and non-state actors against militia that control populations through rape and other forms of bodily atrocity. Speaking of the ‘new wars’, Kofi Annan commented that: ‘A disturbing characteristic of these conflicts is the practice of deliberately targeting civilian populations – the majority being women and children’ (Annan 2002: ix). A UN gender training manual reminds military peacekeepers that in post-conflict situations: ‘Women with the loss of their male family members, are vulnerable to discrimination and are subject to human rights violations’ (DPKO 2001: 20). In new wars discourse, the notion of ‘women’s human rights’ typically refers to women’s right to bodily integrity, rather than broader notions of social or economic rights. Thus, in post-Cold War security discourse the term ‘human rights violations’ typically means bodily violation and signifies a lack of democracy.
Since 1989 the UN, NATO, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, EU, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and humanitarian NGOs have assumed links between security, democracy and capitalist development: such consensus on the economic foundations of democracy would have been impossible in the Soviet era (Paris 2003: 446). This theory of democratic peace posits that democratic states do not go to war with each other and a democratic world would be a peaceful world (Bellamy et al. 2004: 30-1). NATO and its allies support a ‘democracy building’ approach to security and discuss their military actions as ‘peace support’, securing broader ‘peacekeeping’ efforts usually coordinated by the UN. Peacekeeping operations have proliferated since 1989: between 1989 and 2010 more than forty new operations were deployed, compared with only sixteen between 1948 and 1988. These post-1989 operations attempt to oversee fundamental economic and political transformation, including attention to ‘women’s human rights’ (Chappell and Evans 1997: table 1; Bellamy et al. 2004: Appendix).
Post-Cold War peacekeeping and democracy building introduces precisely the kind of Western surveillance of developing countries’ domestic affairs that the Soviets opposed at the UN when they scorned international action against trafficking in women. Violations of women’s human rights, in the sense of bodily violation, have become an international security concern subject to monitoring and intervention. The Security Council first mentioned sexual violence in December 1992, declaring itself ‘appalled by reports of the massive, organized and systematic detention and rape of women, in particular Muslim women, in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (UNSC 1992). This observation fuelled the case for military intervention and reports of rape now routinely accompany foreign military intervention or calls for intervention. The Clinton administration ordered that State Department human rights reports document violations of women’s human rights, a practice that continues (Joachim 2003: 260). The UN also began monitoring violence against women and in 1994 the UN General Assembly created a new post of special rapporteur to research gender-based violence, while the UN system began producing information on violence against women around the globe. Following this trend, regional powers now also monitor and intervene in the gender relations of their neighbors. For example, in the Pacific, the Australian and New Zealand police run training programs for police from Tonga, Samoa, the Cook Islands and Kiribati on dealing with domestic violence and they include domestic violence as an issue in their meetings with police from the region (Australian Federal Police [AFP] 2010; PPDVP 2010).
The reemergence of ‘trafficking in women’ as a ‘violence against women’ issue facilitated policing of the new illegal trade and migration routes in Europe and Central Asia that opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The USA and EU began pushing for a new International Convention on Transnational Organized Crime in the early 1990s. In 1995 Hilary Clinton met anti-trafficking activists at the UN Beijing Women’s Conference and began championing the issue. With Madeleine Albright, she co-chaired the President’s Interagency Council on Women to ensure that the Convention would include a protocol to address trafficking in women (Harrington 2010: 148). Following this, the USA passed the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (US Congress 2000), which required the State Department to produce regular country reports on trafficking in persons (reports).
Such monitoring contributes to a hegemonic conflation of women’s equality with ‘Western’ (or Northern) civilization, and women’s oppression with an undeveloped ‘rest’, obscuring ‘Western’ agency in both male privilege and violence against women. Peacekeeping practices clearly manifest ‘Western’ male violence and domination. An Australian English language teacher in Timor Leste described how ‘within the first five minutes of my landing’ the expatriate head of the project told her that she had come to ‘a man’s world’ (Appleby 2005: 165). Another noted that the gender ratio in the expatriate Dili community seemed to be ‘nine men to one woman’ and even men in civilian positions, such as journalists and NGO workers, liked to don ‘little military outfits’ (Appleby 2005: 168). She remembered her time in Timor Leste as,
probably one of the freakiest experiences of my life … the whole bar scene, the pick up in the bars, like those World War II movies. And men, those truckloads of soldiers looking like predators, looking at us like predators. They’d drive past and I’d just look at them and think, when I was by myself and I’d think, thank god I’m not in one of the villages that you’re liberating! (Appleby 2005: 169)
Likewise, whistleblower Ben Johnston described the private military contractor scene in Bosnia as ‘such a boys’ club because these guys are making so much money’ (Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights 2002: 28). Australian women international police also talked of peacekeeping operations as a ‘boys club’, of displays of ‘male ego and macho bull crap’ in rivalry between Australian state and territory policy and the Federal police (Harris and Goldsmith 2010: 302). One woman police officer said:
Missions have a tendency to bring out ‘old’ culture that, in my experience, has been greatly reduced in the AFP [Australian Federal Police], but will never cease to exist. This old culture (jobs for the boys, pack mentality, don’t rat on your mates, if nobody else sees it, it didn’t happen and so on) is still very much alive. (Harris and Goldsmith 2010: 302)
Studies of Nordic male military peacekeepers show that volunteers imagine going on a peacekeeping mission as a great male adventure away from the world of women and family (Tallberg 2007: 74).
Commentators frequently assume that men from ‘advanced democracies’ revert to the patriarchal norms of the society they aim to democratize on peacekeeping operations; again obscuring ‘Western’ agency in violence against women. Thus an interviewee in Afghanistan said ‘Afghan culture seemed to rub off on them [male expatriates], it also made it difficult for women expats at times whilst I worked in Afghanistan. Male arrogance’ (Barrow 2009: 59). Similarly, Harris and Goldsmith argue that ‘distance from gendered social norms in the home country, location within a society that has different gender-based roles and expectations, and a male dominated international deployment’ produced the sexist behavior of International Australian Police (Harris and Goldsmith 2010: 303). Such commentary allows the problem of peacekeeper sexism to be acknowledged, but displaced onto local cultural norms in ‘non-Western’ countries.
The Working Group for Women, Peace and Security, a network of women’s NGOs which advocated for 1325, monitor the problem of peacekeeper violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, pointing to implementation of the Resolution as the solution (NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security n.d.). The Resolution’s origins lie in joint UN research on ‘Gender and UN Peacekeeping’, consisting of a series of case studies that revealed patterns of sexism and abuse across operations and posited gender mainstreaming as the solution (Carey 2001: 51). Since passing 1325, the Security Council has continued to remain, in the words of the Resolution, ‘actively seized of the matter’ by issuing Presidential Statements requesting reports that review implementation (UNSC 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010a, 2010b). Implementation of 1325 depends upon country-level commitment to changes in the composition and conduct of their security services. International legal experts differ as to whether UN member states must abide by Security Council resolutions. In practice, states do not treat them as binding and it is up to feminist NGOs to hold states to the commitments they make at the UN (Tryggestad 2009: 544). In 2006, CEDAW began referencing compliance with 1325 in its country reporting sessions (Hudson 2009: 62 -3). Such feminist monitoring doubtless ensures that most peacekeeping missions now incorporate gender officer positions and have sexual exploitation and abuse reporting procedures. Feminists have developed gender training resources and numerous security officials involved in peacekeeping have attended gender training sessions.
Thus, Resolution 1325 has allowed acknowledgement of peacekeeping operations’ sexist culture at the highest level by representing this culture as a technically manageable problem, which the UN has a process for addressing in consultation with women’s NGOs. In this way the Resolution manages the tensions created by security experts’ engagement with feminist NGOs as part of new forms of peacekeeping. When feminists produce information about peacekeeper sexual violence, experts can call for more effort to implement the Resolution and the evidence of peacekeepers as sexually violent does not undermine the broader project of peacekeeping and democracy building.
Conclusion
Social movement theorists provide celebratory accounts of feminist transnational advocacy networks’ success in putting violence against women onto the mainstream security agenda. While not denying that activist efforts made a difference, the transformed agenda of UN women’s bureaucracies and NGOs in the late twentieth century largely reflects the end of Cold War superpower rivalry and the emergence of the USA as the unrivaled global hegemon fighting the new wars and championing democratization as a security issue. Within this context, women’s human rights, signified by the problem of violence against women, has emerged as an integral part of the post-Cold War security agenda, with the USA, backed by international institutions and allies, adopting the pose of democratic defender of women and children. Leading global institutions and self-styled democratic states have represented the problem of global security by criminalizing their military opponents as perpetrators of bodily human rights violations against innocent civilians, especially women and children. Thus, the post-Cold War agenda of women’s NGOs active in the UN system and UN women’s bureaucracies reflects these broader changes in hegemonic security discourse. In this new global environment feminist activists have highlighted the contradiction between official rhetoric and peacekeeper perpetrated sexual violence, abuse, harassment and exploitation. Resolution 1325 has allowed for high-level recognition of the validity of these feminist concerns while representing peacekeeper sexism as a manageable problem and thereby avoiding information about peacekeeper sexual violence undermining the broader framework of new forms of peacekeeping as a way of fighting the ‘new wars’.