The gender agenda

With a seat at the UN Security Council, Australia is perfectly placed to champion the cause of women on the global stage, writes KATRINA LEE-KOO and SUSAN HARRIS RIMMER.

Australia has recently been given a lead role in international security debates at the United Nations, and now we must decide how to use this rare opportunity.

Tomorrow in Canberra representatives from civil society organisations will meet with government to discuss Australia’s priorities for its 2013-2014 seat on the United Nations Security Council.  

While the successful UN bid did not elicit the same excitement from the Australian public as, say, the 2000 Olympic bid, it is nonetheless a significant opportunity for Australia to influence the direction of the Security Council, and, more broadly, to promote global peace and security.  Civil society, and the general public, should therefore encourage the government to take full advantage of these opportunities.

One of the issues on the minds of everyone at tomorrow’s meeting will be what agendas Australia might pursue during its first of two one-month Presidency of the Security Council, due in September 2013.  

With the Presidency, Australia assumes an important responsibility for handling the crisis management powers of the Security Council as determined by the UN Charter.  It also gives Australia the opportunity to promote broader issues of the Security Council’s work, like peacebuilding or protection of civilians.  

Australia has already demonstrated a strong commitment to the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) agenda.  This is an important, cross-cutting issue that is relevant to all areas of the Security Council’s peace and security work.  It is also one where Australia is very well positioned to make a real difference.  The agenda is a cluster of five United Nations Security Council resolutions that that have been passed between 2000 and 2010. 

These resolutions highlight that women and girls experience conflict in ways that are different from men and boys by virtue of their gender, and that violations of women’s rights should be brought to justice. Second, they note that the experiences of women and girls, and females themselves, have been overlooked in processes designed to bring about peace.  Third, they draw upon evidence that peace is more likely to be sustainable when women are included alongside men in designing processes for conflict prevention, conflict resolution, peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction.

These points have been demonstrated in all conflict zones.  Since 1990, of the many peace agreements signed worldwide, only 16 per cent either had a woman at the negotiating table or mentioned women at all in the content of the agreement.  Furthermore, the UN has never appointed a woman to be the chief mediator of a peace process, for all the words written about women as peace-makers.

Yet research demonstrates that women face unique forms of economic insecurity during and after conflict.  For example, as a result of its recent conflicts, the Iraq Ministry of Planning estimates that there are about 900,000 widows (or female heads-of-household) in Iraq today; but less than 10 per cent of them receive government benefits.  In a patriarchal country whose reconstruction process has focused on getting men back to work, women are unlikely to find economic independence.  Many women consider their best option is to remarry, yet women outnumber men in Iraq, compounding this already problematic solution.  

Similarly, the UN’s work has highlighted how women are targeted for specific kinds of gender-based violence as part of a conflict, as is the case in Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan and the Sudan.  

The UN’s ‘Stop Rape Now’ campaign has focused upon how the tactics of rape, forced pregnancy, sexual slavery and other forms of violence against women has become a routine strategy of war.  For instance, estimates suggest that between 20-50,000 women were raped as part of a broad military strategy during the 1990s conflict in the former Yugoslavia.  During the 1994 Rwandan genocide the UN Special Rapporteur estimated that the number of counts of sexual violence against women was at least 250,000, and possibly as many as 500,000.  This, and other forms of violence affects women’s mental and physical health, livelihoods, employment opportunities, education, and social security as well as having a potentially negative impact on their capacity to participate in peacebuilding processes.

UN member states have been called upon to ensure that there is a gender perspective included in its analysis and understanding of conflict; the UN has been pushed to include women in all aspects of its work.  At its most basic, this translates to a consideration of how an issue or approach affects men and women differently, and this is long overdue. The first criminal investigation team to Rwanda after the genocide failed to recognise that horrendous levels of sexual violence had occurred until a wave of babies were born, nine months later.

In order to implement this agenda both domestically and internationally, Australia has produced a National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, released in 2012.  The plan outlines Australia’s commitment to including women in peace negotiations, training our police and peacekeepers to understand gender issues, and increasing women’s representation in our own armed forces.

So what can Australia do in the Security Council to promote this agenda?  The short answer is plenty.  This September, Australia can promote strategies to hold existing gains on the issue and protect women's full range of rights during military drawdowns and other transitional periods, such as we are now witnessing in Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands but also many other states.  

Australia has the opportunity and ability to bring the lived experience of women to the attention of the primary security institution in the globe, and it should do so.  After all, whose security is it anyway?

Dr Katrina Lee-Koo is a senior lecturer in international relations at the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. Dr Susan Harris Rimmer is the Director of Studies at the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. They are both members of the Women, Peace and Security Academic Collective.  

A version of this article was also published on The Conversation.