Women’s participation in peace and security: Why it matters

8 March 2022

In mid-February, a photo from a CEO lunch at the Munich Security Conference made its rounds online, causing widespread criticism as it depicted an all-white, all-male gathering of corporate leaders. While the photo was not representative of the overall event — organisers pointed out that almost half of the conference speakers were women — it showed that the debate on how women get to participate in matters of international peace and security is both a timely and a relevant one. This debate attends to the imbalances of how women are represented in international affairs — be it on conference panels, in policymaking, international diplomacy, or the security sector.

Facts and figures paint a bleak picture

While there has been improvement, a lot remains to be done, as women continue to be woefully underrepresented in the peace and security domain. There are only 19 incumbent female defence ministers in the world, women make up only 5.4 per cent of military personnel in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations, and of the twenty European Union (EU) Common Security and Defence Policy missions and operations currently deployed, only three are led by women. Studies show that female experts also make up only one-third of speakers at public conferences or panel discussions on matters of peace and security. In international diplomacy, women constitute only 20 per cent of ambassadors worldwide, ranging from 48.1 per cent in Sweden to 0.7 per cent in Russia. Once a woman becomes ambassador, she is more likely to be posted in states of lower military or economic standing as compared to her male colleagues.

Even when women do break glass ceilings in foreign policy-making, they are regularly belittled and patronised, as was the case when a male journalist demeaned the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock as a “young lady” on morning TV. Women constituted only 6 per cent of mediators or signatories and 13 per cent of negotiators in peace talks between 1992 and 2019. The most recent example are the talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials on 28 February that took place without a single woman at the table.

That women should have a seat at the table debating and deciding matters of peace and security, and a meaningful role in the institutions and operations carrying out these decisions is of course only one aspect of a more gender-sensitive foreign policy. For example, in addition to equal representation, the two additional pillars that have informed Sweden’s “feminist foreign policy” since 2014 are the promotion of equal rights for women and girls, and the sufficient allocation of economic resources to politics promoting gender equality.

Furthermore, considering gender alone is not enough to ensure a fully representative policy-making that addresses structural inequality for everyone. Instead, this requires attention to intersectional dynamics between gender and, for example, class or ethnicity. As Rachel Tausendfreund asks in a piece on feminist foreign policy: “If 50 per cent of Germany’s foreign-policy decision-makers are women, but the table is still dominated by the children of lawyers and doctors without a migration background — is that the right kind of representation?”

From broadening the agenda to helping operational effectiveness

Nevertheless, women’s meaningful participation on panels, in politics, and in peace processes is about more than living a “feminist fantasy” or even “just” about their equal representation. A growing body of evidence instead shows that it has a pivotal impact on the success or failure of peace processes. First, women’s participation in negotiating peace can open up new perspectives that make peace processes more likely to succeed. Because women and girls experience war and peace differently from men and boys, female participants often “broaden the agenda” in peace talks and raise social issues in negotiations that ultimately help societies recover from war and reconcile. This, in turn, makes the peace that follows more just and inclusive for everyone.

That women should have a seat at the table debating and deciding matters of peace and security, and a meaningful role in the institutions and operations carrying out these decisions is of course only one aspect of a more gender-sensitive foreign policy.

For instance, asking why war broke out in Ukraine in 2014 and how it can be sustainably transformed, Almut Rochowanski writes about women teachers’ anecdotes of how students from the separatist territories could no longer enrol in a university in the rest of the country, accelerating grievances among young people. With a nod to the lack of representation in the negotiations led by diplomats from France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine that sought to end the war in the Donbas region in 2014 and 2015, she concludes: “Presumably, no one at the Normandy Format negotiating table has ever heard of this problem”.

Second, women’s participation as military experts, mission heads, soldiers, or police officers in peace operations can make international engagement in armed conflicts more effective. Since women typically operate outside of the existing military, economic, or political power structures, they are more likely to be perceived as impartial peacebuilders. Female police officers or soldiers in peacekeeping missions also tend to have access to places or populations that are often closed to men.

For instance, research on NATO’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan shows that other than their male colleagues, the deployed female security officers had access to and could talk to both men and women, meaning they could gather valuable and critical intelligence about potential security risks that helped the operation’s overall effectiveness.

Having said that, it is important to remember that women’s participation is no magic bullet for peace, or even for protecting women’s rights in conflict zones. For instance, while higher female participation in UN peacekeeping decreases allegations of sexual exploitation reported against these missions, military hierarchies often remain intact in these missions and prevent penalties no matter the number of women involved. Socialisation between male and female soldiers also means women often do not challenge their colleagues’ behaviour (not to forget that it is also not their responsibility to do so, but the responsibility of troop-contributing countries as well as the UN system).

Finally, women’s participation can also increase the legitimacy of international peacebuilders, such as the EU. Research tells us that it is vital that populations in conflict-affected countries perceive international peacebuilders as role models for the policies they seek to implement.

Representation and rights start at home

However, the EU is not a good role model when it comes to equal rights and representation in peace and security. One reason is that right-wing political forces with anti-feminist and anti-democratic agendas have gained strength in almost all EU member states in recent years. This directly affects the safety and security of women. For instance, in Poland, at least two pregnant women have died as a result of the near-total ban on abortion that came into effect in January 2021.

Another example is the violence women face in refugee camps at the EU’s external border. European security forces are often not able to prevent it or have, at times, even exacerbated conditions of insecurity. And when I asked interviewees for my own research about the EU’s commitment to equal representation in its external relations, a European diplomat told me that the gender quotas European donors demand for police reform programmes in Asia or Africa could not even be met in Berlin, Paris or Brussels. Likewise, politicians in Nepal were happy to point out to me that demands of having more women serve in the Nepali Army were always put forward by male European security experts.

Crises of legitimacy, because peacebuilders do not practice what they preach, can have harmful consequences for the success of peace processes. Women’s equal participation is thus about more than representation alone — and for peacebuilders, it starts at home.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Dr Julia Strasheim is Deputy Managing Director and Program Director for European and International Politics at the Hamburg-based Bundeskanzler-Helmut-Schmidt-Stiftung and Research Associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). Image credit: UN Women/Flickr.