Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security: An Introduction

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.