Mainstreaming Gender in Peacekeeping Operations: Can Africa Learn From International Experience?

Sunday, September 3, 2000
Author: 
Heidi Hudson
Africa

Peacekeeping issues in all their diversity have enjoyed persistent priority on the agenda of many African security specialists and practitioners. Increased attention, however, has contributed much more to reveal the complexity of the subject, rather than to the implementation of workable models. Despite a plethora of lessons learned from specific international and regional cases, many matters in this field of study remain unresolved. Training of African peacekeepers and much of the official doctrinal thinking still rely heavily on United Nations-type approaches. Also, in situations where western approaches to peacekeeping are being questioned the momentum is lost due to a lack of doctrinal consensus on the continent. Africa has yet to come up with a truly indigenous approach to peacekeeping. The fluid and insecure nature of conditions on the ground and the divergent motives of the warring parties can often be traced back to centuries of tension and conflict. The situation on the ground therefore increasingly renders the UN peacekeeping doctrine irrelevant and necessitates a critical look at traditional assumptions.

In the context of an already complex peacekeeping discourse and the vast underrepresentation of gender issues in this area, combining the two variables invariably raises the question whether gender can in any way promote the resolution of some of the many unresolved issues. The UN has little or no influence over the personnel recruited for peace operations by the various troop-contributing countries. Given the trend towards the development of regional security complexes and an increased emphasis on indigenous and more forceful peacekeeping, more developing countries are currently contributing troops to peace operations. In Africa, attempts at establishing self-reliance in this area have been met with numerous challenges related to the lack of capacity and political will to act constructively under suboptimal conditions. Given such enormous challenges in Africa, it is doubtful whether the percentage of women in peace operations in Africa is likely to increase in the near future unless concerted efforts are made to highlight gender issues. The political, economic and social turmoil on the continent further does not create conditions conducive to the mainstreaming of gender in society, in general. Furthermore, UN efforts at mainstreaming gender perspectives in peacekeeping operations also took a long time to materialise as will be shown later.

In spite of these difficulties, mainstreaming gender in peacekeeping operations is beneficial. A feminist or gender perspective not only enhances the understanding of global (non-state) developments by analysing and confronting the partiality of masculinist accounts, but also offers alternative constructions that could lead to new and creative answers to global security problems of which peacekeeping is both a solution and a cause. It will be a long and arduous struggle, however, which would necessarily have to take cognisance of the lessons learned by the UN, the Scandinavian countries and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in this regard. The purpose of this article is therefore to highlight a number of trends and areas of concern for African peacekeepers in relation to peacekeeping, human security and gender. Since the debate on the continent is still in its infancy, this contribution seeks to provide an exploratory framework for discussion and analysis.

Document PDF: 

Mainstreaming Gender PKOs Africa Intl Experience, Hudson, 2000