OPINION: The Broken Promise of UN Security Council Resolution 1325
What's next in the realm of Women, Peace and Security at the UN? How Resolution 1325 has become a paper tiger that repeats already internationally agreed standards and has lost the attribute that made it a breakthrough, namely its provocativeness.
When UN Security Council passed Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security in autumn 2000, attributes such as "path-breaking", "revolutionary" and "spectacular" have been used both in academia and politics to refer to its adoption. However, euphoria has lately given way to a more realistic, if not disappointed, picture of the state of the Women, Peace and Security movement. Although the Security Council has adopted four resolutions building on the legacy of Resolution 1325 in 2008, 2009 and 2010, it took eight years of silence to get to this point. Furthermore, these resolutions have in many regards abandoned the historic path of Resolution 1325. Indeed, as newly appointed UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet has recently pointed out, the international community has performed poorly when it comes to promoting women's engagement in peace and security; “Too many doors have remained closed”. Resolutions 1820, 1888, 1889 and 1960, which should have continued to build on the framework of Resolution 1325, have failed to advance the original motive of the Women, Peace and Security movement.
However, it should be admitted that these four resolutions have made at least a small contribution to the legacy of Resolution 1325: they have managed to secure commitment and raise awareness from the world's most important security institution, the UN Security Council, for the argument that gender is a vital issue of security politics. In that regard they may at least, and until now, have prevented Resolution 1325 from falling into obscurity.
Resolution 1820, 1888, 1889 and 1960 have, however, failed to breathe new life into Resolution 1325 with fresh and tangible policy input. In fact, much of the strong language of Resolution 1325 has been lost along the way due to the pressure of some laggard countries unwilling to accept the further inclusion of gender concerns in the international security domain. This becomes especially evident when one examines the recent and pronounced trend of limiting the Women, Peace and Security movement to discussion based only on the claim for prosecution of sexual violence against women and not their further role in peace-keeping missions. In UN resolutions 1820, 1888 and 1960 this concern takes center stage, while ideas of the active inclusion of women in conflict prevention and mediation are on the decline in these texts. While a Special Representative to the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict was named in 2009 and the language on the prosecution of perpetrators of sexual violence has become increasingly judicial, efforts to increase female participation in peace building and peace prevention have clearly taken second, if not third, stage.
This difficult political situation has also had a decisive influence on the legal terms of the Women, Peace and Security movement. In the past the ideas of Resolution 1325 that center around both the commitments to women's leadership in peacemaking and conflict prevention as well as to the prevention of and response to conflict related sexual violence have been described as "a norm in the making" (True-Frost, C. C., The Security Council and Norm Consumption, in: International Law and Politics 40 (2007), 115-217.). But the content of this norm becomes ever more indeterminate due to the newer resolutions. International lawyers that wish to identify concrete legal innovations from the newer resolutions will be left without any insight into the original. They will ask what has become of the original ideas of including more women in international peace building efforts. They will point at the Geneva Conventions and their Protocols as well as at the Statute of the International Criminal Court to show that the prosecution-based part of Resolution 1325 mostly repeats older statements from international criminal and humanitarian law. They will realize that the UN Security Council has made no legal headway in the last ten years on the gender and security agenda.
Its seems that the progressive states at the Security Council who were originally supportive of Resolution 1325 have deliberately decided to abandon the path of a complete norm. Presumably this is to secure the clause of Resolution 1325 based on the more easily bankable picture of women as passive victims of conflict. However, this decision has some dangerous negative outcomes. Not only does this alienate the feminist movement, once one of the fiercest proponents of the idea of Resolution 1325, but it also risks making the Women, Peace and Security movement vanish into thin air due to its relative unimportance. A paper tiger that only repeats already internationally agreed and even codified standards. The Women, Peace and Security movement will lose the attribute that once made it a milestone, namely its provocativeness.
The latest resolution, Resolution 1960, confirms many of these fears. Instead of introducing, as many had hoped, a monitoring and accountability mechanism on Women and Armed Conflict at the Security Council based on an already established set of twenty-six comprehensive indicators, the monitoring tool included in the resolution once again focuses only on "conflict-related sexual violence, including rape in situations of armed conflict and post-conflict".
New promises: none.