Abstract
Collective security and peacekeeping, one of its progeny, have traditionally been thought to have little relevance to women, apart from providing a means to provide for their protection. Yet it takes only a moment’s reflection to see the gendered shape of this thinking, which casts military men and diplomats as the primary actors, and women, often together with children, as the vulnerable potential victims whose defence and rescue help to motivate or even legitimate military intervention — whether forceful or with the consent of the state in question. This gendered schemata continues to pervade laws, policies and practices relating to the maintenance of international peace and security, as seen with the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both relied heavily on the rationale of protecting women and advancing ‘women’s rights’ to shore up waning public support in the west.1 The same rationale is also frequently used to explain and justify peacekeeping and the engagement of the international community in post-conflict reconstruction. Through these means, the well-worn gender hierarchy, of masculine capability associated with strength and female vulnerability connected to lack, is constantly repeated and reconstituted, even in those places where the international community claims that it is helping to construct post-conflict societies that respect and promote women’s equality.
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Notes
L. B. Costin, ‘Feminism, pacifism, internationalism and the 1915 International Congress of Women’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 5, No. 3–4 (1982), p. 301;
A. Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London: Pandora Press, 1985);
L. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997);
J. A. Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992);
and C. Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
See, for example, D. Otto, ‘Power and danger: Feminist engagement with international law through the UN Security Council’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, Vol. 32 (2010), p. 97.
C. Cohn, H. Kinsella and S. Gibbings, ‘Women, peace and security: Resolution 1325’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2004), p. 130;
D. Otto, ‘A sign of “weakness”? Disrupting gender certainties in the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325’, Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2006), p. 113.
S. Whitworth, Men, Militarism and UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004), p. 120.
B. Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace: Preventative Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-Keeping (New York: United Nations, 1992), para. 20.
C. Bell and C. O’Rourke, ‘Peace agreements or pieces of paper? The impact of UNSC Resolution 1325 on peace processes and their agreements’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2010), p. 941;
F. Ní Aoláin, ‘Women, security, and the patriarchy of internationalized transitional justice’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2009), p. 1055.
D. Otto, ‘The Security Council’s alliance of “gender legitimacy”: The symbolic capital of Resolution 1325’, in H. Charlesworth and J. Coicaud (eds), Fault Lines of International Legitimacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 239.
For elaboration, see G. Heathcote, The Law on the Use of Force: A Feminist Analysis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).
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© 2014 Gina Heathcote and Dianne Otto
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Otto, D., Heathcote, G. (2014). Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security: An Introduction. In: Heathcote, G., Otto, D. (eds) Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security. Thinking Gender in Transnational Times. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400215_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400215_1
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