{"id":31066,"date":"2017-03-27T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T01:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=31066"},"modified":"2017-03-27T11:30:56","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T00:30:56","slug":"peacekeeping-wps-agenda-less-talk-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/peacekeeping-wps-agenda-less-talk-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Peacekeeping and the WPS agenda: \u2018less talk and more action\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
This article is part of a series on \u2018Women, Peace and Security\u2019 that <\/em>The Strategist\u00a0is publishing\u00a0in recognition of International Women\u2019s Day 2017.<\/em><\/p>\n In the Security Council debate around Resolution 2242<\/a> in 2015\u2014which marked 15 years since the adoption of the ground breaking Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS)\u2014a key refrain was: \u2018we\u2019ve been paying lip service to the importance of this issue for 15 years. It\u2019s now time for less talk and more action\u2019.<\/p>\n Resolution 1325 has become the guide for all UN policies and programs in supporting women in conflict and post conflict societies. In this context it\u2019s essential that our work focuses not only on protecting women but on empowering them to participate fully in all the processes that affect them. UN Peacekeeping implements this mandate primarily through gender advisers at headquarters and in the field.<\/p>\n Our first gender advisers were deployed to Kosovo and East Timor in 1999 and as mandated we now have them on the ground in all 16 peacekeeping missions. Their core functions, as articulated in our Gender Equality in UN Peacekeeping Operations Policy (2010)<\/a> are to provide technical guidance and support to senior management of the peacekeeping mission; to mainstream gender issues into all civil, military and police components; and to build the capacity of personnel to guide the gender mainstreaming efforts.<\/p>\n After a recent DPKO internal evaluation of our work on WPS, it\u2019s clear that the UN has put an impressive amount of effort into putting policies, guidance and training programs and materials in place to support implementation of this mandate. Unfortunately, what remains is a general lack of understanding of why gender mainstreaming is important and how it adds value to our broader peacekeeping mandate and responsibilities.<\/p>\n Firstly, there is a lack of leadership on this mandate from senior management in UN peacekeeping. This isn\u2019t surprising given the competing priorities faced by the leaders of peacekeeping missions. Secondly, the level of gender adviser posts and their structural location within our missions have reduced the access of our Senior Gender Advisers to mission leadership and created a kind of \u2018gender enclave\u2019 rather than supporting the mainstream effort.<\/p>\n We have had a high turnover of gender advisers, have an under resourced Gender Unit at headquarters and had posts removed or reallocated in our missions. These factors have also led to a lack of perceived career path for gender advisers. Due in part to our inability to show the value-added of the WPS mandate to the overall mandate of the missions, it\u2019s sometimes perceived as a technical\/niche area and not the responsibility of all mission staff. This is problematic because of the positive impact that our WPS work could potentially have on issues like community access, information gathering and analysis, and early warning mechanisms.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, there are several examples of what we know works. All our missions now hold \u2018Global Open Days\u2019 on WPS every year, where the head of mission reaches out to local women\u2019s groups across the country to give high level political attention to their concerns and to enhance their roles. In Darfur for example, at the most recent Open Day<\/a> women from four states came together to create an institutional mechanism to support the implementation by government of Resolution 1325 and create a women\u2019s protection network.<\/p>\n