It Matters How You ‘Do’ Gender in Peacebuilding: African Approaches and Challenges

Abstract

The article draws attention to the consequences of simplistically equating gender, sex and women when doing peacebuilding. Drawing on the ambivalent nature of security architecture interventions from the African continent, I make a case for keeping a variety of conceptual approaches to gender mainstreaming in mind in order to avoid a narrow fixation on adding women. I show through selected examples how institutional frameworks and commitments may appear progressive but could have potentially exclusionary effects. Gender is an important lens to analyse peacebuilding practices and commitments, but only if viewed as an action or means of ‘doing’ that disrupts additive liberal approaches to peacebuilding. As an alternative, the article proposes a gender-relational and intersected analysis of everyday securities and peacebuilding. A focus on lived, gendered and racialised experiences of insecurity and peacebuilding at the everyday level offsets the abstract and universalised approach adopted by states as well as regional and continental players. The article concludes that approaches to gender mainstreaming through sameness, difference and diversity should be seen as complementary to allow space for a context-specific, thick analysis of gender relations on the ground as well as gendered processes of structural or institutional change.

A feminist opening of resilience: Elizabeth Grosz, Liberian Peace Huts and IR critiques

“…First, the liberal feminist approach that has equated gender with women. Scholars criticise that the agenda has primarily relied on a descriptive representation frame that promotes sex equality and not gender equality, slowly increasing the number of female bodies in decision-making structures and in the security forces without adding qualitative and substantive changes in the positions women hold, or the tasks and responsibilities they are assigned to, or the funds gender units receive (Cohn and Duncanson 2020; Kirby and Shepherd 2016 ; Ellerby 2017 ; Hudson 2021 ). Relatedly, critics claim that women are included only to fulfil certain feminine tasks that serve operational effectiveness (Basini and Ryan 2016 ).…”

“…Second, feminist scholars acknowledge that the spirit of those who advocated for the existence of the WPS agenda, which was to facilitate the development of antimilitarist politics of peace and dismantle the power structures that uphold the core tenets of liberalism and its everyday forms of inequality and insecurity, has been betrayed (Wibben et al 2019 ). Scholars denounce that the agenda has ended up legitimising and normalising militarised peacekeeping and peacebuilding processes, based on dominant state-based, masculinised and pro-violence ideas of security (Stern and Zalewski 2009 ; Jauhola 2016 ; Hudson 2021 ; Ryan, this issue; Berry, this issue). Even when ‘prevention’ is a key concern in these resolutions (with potential to unleash a transformative vision for peace), it is in practice accorded with a logic of militarism (a task for peacekeepers, police or the military) or accorded with a logic of ‘elite-centric security politics’ (related to activities such as countering terrorism or violent extremism) (Shepherd 2020c ).…”

“…We believe that by continuously critiquing the interpretation, translation and implementation of the WPS agenda by programmes of resilience, these critiques are reenergizing policy approaches to learn, recompose and endure, only to inevitably fail again (Zalewski and Runyan 2013 ). As we show in the first part of the article, both policymakers and their critics tend to reduce resilience to an egalitarian project, where bureaucratic institutions and mechanical policy initiatives are deployed to pursue gender equality and advance in sustaining peace, compensating women for socio-economic injustices and increasing their participation in decision-making (Hudson 2021 ). Although critiques have rightly shown that further initiatives, funds and efforts are needed to achieve gender balancing and parity, we claim that feminist critiques are often stripped from their aspiration to transform the existing gender power relations, as soon as they are selectively taken up and channelled through funds, projects, and deadlines to strengthen resilience.…”

Petro-politics, Gender Violence and Human Trafficking in Nigeria’s Niger Delta Region

“…Turcotte (2011) emphasizes that petro-politics in the Niger Delta is intricately embedded in the larger structure of gender violence linked to international and local oppressions. At the same time, the turbulent oil politics intersects with gender violence and inadvertently expose women to human trafficking for forced labor and sexual exploitation, as they cooperate with and/or resist global oppressions (Hudson, 2021) and local subjugation. Related research found that endemic poverty compels young girls and women to succumb to human traffickers for sex work, forced labor and other forms of modern-day slavery (Ingwe et al, 2012;Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta, 2018;2022).…”