Dr. Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv
Twitter:
@ghoogj
The complex civil-military
operations of the early twenty-first century were a testing ground for the
implementation of the groundbreaking October 2000 United Nations Security
Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on women, peace and security.
The test went beyond the instrumental “increasing gender awareness” amongst
militaries and their governments. The very nature of these complex civil-military
operations have also been gendered. The use of force and enemy-centric thinking
(combat operations, raids, etc) competed with population-centric approaches
that included humanitarian and development aid, and governance support, all
undertaken with the intention to win a war through “hearts and minds” (trust of
the population) rather than violence.
The gendering of these approaches became
visible as the participating intervening nations in Afghanistan and Iraq grew
weary of slow progress in these operations
and a complicated and demanding environment. An increasing rhetoric from a
number of participating nations favoured a return to traditional,
hyper-masculinist military practices – “killing people and destroying things” over a cosmopolitan,
multi-dimensional, “feminized” approach that saw a
larger role for non-kinetic (non-lethal) measures. The question is whether or
not the implementation of gender perspectives within military institutions will
suffer a setback as a result.
UNSCR 1325 recognized the important role
of non-state actors, in particular women who had been marginalized from
dominant state security discussions, to the creation and maintenance of
international peace and security. Most of the focus has been on a binary
understanding of gender (male-female) with little-to-no
emphasis on LGBTQ issues and debates. UNSCR 1325, and the subsequent
related resolutions,
highlighted the importance of preventing abuses against women in conflict
settings, protecting women and girls and their rights, as well as emphasized
the importance of including women at all phases of peace-building. It
additionally includes provisions for gender awareness and mainstreaming whereby
international and regional organizations would include gender perspectives in
planning and implementation of peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding
initiatives. Militaries play a crucial role in this process, as those who are
on-the-ground and engaging in some of the closest interaction with civilians
both positively and negatively.
The demanding, large-scale,
civil-military operations that would follow on the heels of UNSCR 1325 provided
ample opportunity to put the resolution to practice. This was easier said than
done however. It involved changing attitudes and biases within powerfully
masculinist institutions to be open to the very notion of a “gender perspective”.
Most militaries are heavily male dominated to begin with. Challenging and
changing the gendered nature of military institutions itself was not an option.
Overall, the process was slow.
For the most part, the implementation of
gender perspectives was instrumentalized insofar as they were seen to be “useful”
to the operation and serve a purpose towards achieving an end state. Such
instrumentalist measures were non-kinetic in nature, whereby trust rather than
weapons play the crucial role. Gender perspectives meant gaining a better
understanding of the operational environment, the relations between men and
women in the area of operations, and the ways in which war affects each
differently due to gender norms and expectations. This in turn generated
programs such as “Female Engagement Teams” or the
equivalent, composed of female soldiers reaching out to women in the civilian
environments of Iraq and later Afghanistan to gain and build upon women’s trust
for the purposes of force protection, learning about women’s security
perspectives within the operational environment and gaining intelligence for
operational planning, and identifying local needs, in some cases to help
provide for these needs (aid projects).
Gender advisers, gender field advisers,
and gender focal points, were designed to ensure expertise and input at all
levels of planning and operational execution. The results of these efforts were
often mixed, implementation would be ad hoc depending on the motivations of
leadership. Training efforts were also mixed, though were improving, not least due
to the efforts of Swedish
initiatives.
While these initiatives were slowly gaining
ground, criticisms
against such programs were also on the rise. FETS were criticized for, among
other things, threatening the security of local women by interacting with them
at all. Women and their families might be targeted by opposing forces if seen
to be communicating with intervening military forces. Any association with
military personnel was thus perceived as a threat to any local civilian.
Additionally, militaries were criticized for engaging women for the purposes of
obtaining information and intelligence. This was considered an abuse of the
civilian environment.
Any military engagement with civilian
actors will always be fraught with difficulties. On the one hand, a military
presence in a civilian environment can be construed as a threat to civilians
directly, or indirectly as armed opposition groups or warring parties will
target civilians who associated with national or intervening militaries.
Militaries are also considered less competent in being able to engage with civilians,
having inadequate backgrounds in identifying needs and providing support. At the same time, non-lethal, civil-military
interaction approaches have also been feminized
and marginalized within many military organizations. With the moves being
made towards fewer troops on the ground and a greater reliance on special
forces and airstrikes, the likelihood that gender perspectives will be further
developed in the military may be questioned.
To what degree will these advances in
gender will be retained? If the focus for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) and other militaries is towards more traditional, masculinist combat
oriented missions, not least focusing on airstrikes and/or special operations
missions, the role and relevance of gender awareness and advisors becomes
limited. For some gender researchers, this might be welcome news.
A core tension within the gender debates
is whether
the military is capable of integrating gender perspectives at all, and
instead end up using both women and gender insights for the purpose of engaging
in the use of force. It is a valid
concern. The dominance of masculinist perspectives does not disappear despite
various efforts at gender mainstreaming. At the same time however, I would
argue the need to keep the focus on civilians and how they are impacted by
conflict, as well as how
they might respond.
As long as state militaries, NATO, and
the UN continue to deploy troops for military/humanitarian/peace operations, it
will be important to continue to seriously examine how we can design a more
flexible, gender aware/informed civil-military policy that ensures respect for
all actors as much as the context allows, and trouble-shoots when the context
challenges such respect. This requires a focus on both problem-solving approaches
(working within the military system) and critical approaches (working to change
the system). It also requires engaging those units/branches of the alliance
that work on civil-military relationships including branches dealing with
civil-military interaction, gender advisors, and functions within information
operations, among others.
Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv is a Professor in the Department of
Sociology, Political Science and Community Planning at University of Tromsø
(UiT)-The Arctic University of Norway. A graduate of the U of Alberta Political
Science Department, she is the author of Understanding Civil-Military Interaction: Lessons Learned from the
Norwegian Model, and is currently
co-editing and contributing to a book on women and human security.
No comments:
Post a Comment