Symposium by GQUAL on CEDAW’s GR40: Gender Parity in Peace Operations – A Receding Goal?

[​​Anne Marie Goetz is a Clinical Professor at the Center for Global Affairs, School of Professional Studies (NYU) and ​former Director of the peace and security section at UN Women.​

Sudarsana Kundu is a Co-founder/Director of GenderSphere, former Executive Director of Gender@Work, and former governance, peace and security specialist at UN Women. 

Foteini Papagioti is a Deputy Director of Policy and Advocacy at the International Center for Research on Women, and a specialist in gender and transnational security]

Peace and political stability are the first on the list of challenging areas in GR40 in which a ‘surge in parity’ is urgently needed.  Peace and security institutions, whether national or multilateral, however, are historically heavily dominated by men, with cultures that valorize combative masculinity. This is particularly marked in security establishments such as ministries of defense or the military, but it is also true of the world of diplomacy and foreign policy.   

We provide here a brief assessment of efforts to promote gender parity in the UN’s peace operations since Secretary-General Guterres introduced the most determined effort to date – the 2017 System-Wide Strategy on Gender Parity – to increase women’s recruitment and retention across the UN Secretariat. This effort, however, coincides with an exceptionally sharp contraction in UN peace operations, which has introduced dynamics that work against the parity effort, and simultaneously undermine the capacity of peacekeeping or political missions to contribute to women’s agency in peacebuilding in conflict-affected contexts.  

Leaders of conflict-affected states are exhibiting a growing preference to address security threats with quick interventions by external military partners (including mercenary forces) rather than UN peacekeepers in multidimensional peace missions that build capacities for negotiated solutions, and reforms to address root causes of conflict. This has led to the closure of a number of UN peacekeeping missions and is an indicator of the current turn away from liberal internationalism. Internationally this means an increase in nationalist leaders disparaging the liberal rules-based order and efforts to center human rights – including gender equality concerns – in conflict resolution. This has created security vacuums in which gender-based violence has increased in contexts such as Sudan and eastern DRC. A ‘parity surge’ in peace operations cannot, therefore, be separated from efforts to defend the merits – and rebuild the effectiveness – of UN peacekeeping.  

UN peacekeeping is considered, according to Jean-Pierre Lacroix, Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations  “a cornerstone of multilateralism in action.” UN peacekeeping missions or Special Political Missions (SPM) are established with uniformed personnel and civilian experts that are contributed by UN Member States. In multidimensional missions, UN staff of the Department of Peace Operations (DPO) and the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) support negotiations, monitor the protection of civilians and human rights concerns, implement confidence-building measures, promote good government, development, elections, and more. The UN also designates gender focal points and gender advisors to bring the principles of UNSCR 1325 into peace work. Research confirms that gender parity enhances the operational effectiveness of peacekeeping because “women’s increased representation has been key in supporting mandate delivery, including by building trust with host communities, strengthening intelligence gathering, and promoting gender parity in national security services”. 

Although the UN’s missions are associated with lower levels of violence, including sexual violence, peacekeeping is in a crisis of legitimacy, facing three major problems: 

• A changing conflict landscape, stranding peacekeeping missions in contexts with no peace to keep, a proliferation of identity-based or criminal fighting groups, and no path to effective mediation; 

• Broad and sometimes conflicting mandates, which can involve engagement in the counterinsurgency efforts of sometimes dysfunctional national militaries, with human rights implications that contradict other peacebuilding functions of missions;   

• Geopolitical polarization in which the Security Council’s divides have undermined funding for peacekeeping, prevented some strategic deployments, and diminished international pressure on host country leaders to meet human rights standards. 

The result has been a significant draw-down of UN missions, with no new major deployments since 2014, despite a sharp increase in the number of conflicts in recent years.  There are 11 peacekeeping missions left, compared to 16 in 2016.  The UN mission in Darfur shut down in 2020. The large multidimensional missions in Mali and Sudan were terminated in 2023, and missions in DRC, CAR and South Sudan are currently transitioning out. There is a current consensus that regional multinational forces (such as AU forces) are the future of peacekeeping.  However, while these military interventions support the host government’s security needs, they do not build peace. In an August 2024 Security Council meeting, Sima Bahous, head of UN Women, warned that the shuttering of multidimensional missions was leaving a “gaping protection vacuum,” with increased levels of sexual violence in contexts like Mali, Sudan and DRC.  

While the SG’s Gender Parity Strategy (GPS) has a target deadline of 2026 to reach parity in Secretariat entities, it set a later deadline of 2028 for mission settings. It was assumed that more time would be needed to address barriers such as dangerous contexts, non-family duty stations, the to be on ‘stand-by’ for sudden and rapid deployments. In 2021, we conducted an external analysis of the SG’s gender parity strategy (GPS) and found deep institutional and cultural barriers preventing gender parity from being realized in UN peacekeeping operations. Many women field mission staff raised concerns about high and unacknowledged levels of sexual harassment and disparagement of the capacities of women managers – amounting to outright insubordination.  Weak grievance redressal mechanisms leave women without safe channels for reporting incidents of sexual harassment at work, making it difficult to hold perpetrators accountable. A culture of impunity discourages women from speaking out, as those responsible for misconduct often face minimal consequences. This adds up to a hyper-masculine, exclusionary culture —described by one interviewee as a “Wild West” environment— an inhospitable space for women’s leadership. There are also persistent incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse of host country civilians by peacekeepers. This erodes the credibility of UN missions and significantly deters women’s engagement with the UN locally, particularly in national officer roles. Without structural reforms addressing these misogynist dynamics, gender parity is a receding goal. 

DPO and UN Women’s 2019 Uniformed Gender Parity Strategy has targets of 15% women in military contingents and 20% in Formed Police Units by 2028. Women were 1% of uniformed peacekeepers in 1993 and 7% in 2023. At this rate of increase, it would take almost half a century for uniformed peacekeepers to reach the modest goal of 15%. There has been more success with including women in police contingents – women are currently 14.4% of civilian police, up from 10.9% in 2020. Mission drawdown will exacerbate the male concentration of uniformed personnel. Their numbers have dropped from 121,000 in 2016 to approximately 59,766 as of October 31, 2024. For military and police personnel, deployment on peacekeeping duty is highly desirable, which means that women in uniform will likely be squeezed out in competition with men for shrinking deployment opportunities. 

There are limits to what the UN can do to increase numbers of women in Member State uniformed contingents. But it has more scope when it comes to its own staff. If we look at combined numbers of civilian staff in peacekeeping, special political missions and other political presences, the 2022 figures are 13,625, of which women constitute 3,491, or 25.6%.  The Gender Parity Strategy has triggered important successes, notably in senior mission leadership positions and at the Headquarters of the Department of Peace Operations (DPO) and the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA).  With the closing of field missions, there are, as of October 2024, just 7,502 civilians in Peacekeeping missions; and this includes national staff.   Women held 36% of positions of head or deputy head of UN peacekeeping and political missions in June 2024. Within the DPO there is a long-standing high turnover and narrow pipeline problem when it comes to women – plenty of women are at the lower professional levels, but at the crucial mid-career professional levels (P-4 and P-5), which are important sources of candidates for senior leadership, their proportions plummet to 30% or less.  

In our 2021 analysis of the SG’s gender parity strategy we found that mission drawdown was leading to a contraction of women amongst the crucial ‘frontline’ civilian staff positions in peacekeeping and political missions. In these contexts, civilian staff with more secure contracts and seniority were retained and redeployed, at the expense of more recent appointments, often women. We projected that it would take till 2041 to reach parity at that rate. In the 3 years since publishing the review, the situation may have shifted, with more men reaching retirement age, but the data is unclear because official sources conflate peace operations with strong gender balance (e.g. Resident Coordinators, or staff of regional peace offices) with more male-dominated components.  Meanwhile the percentage of women amongst national professional officers – a crucial source of personnel that is also an opportunity for the UN to promote women’s engagement in peace work – remains low, at less than 30%.  

Feminist security experts have insisted that peace operations must embed gender equality from the ground up, connecting women’s participation in local conflict resolution, to national politics, to international conflict prevention. GR40 reflects this perspective in its recommendations for parity in top peace and security decision-making and planning (pages 17-19). While gender parity in the staff of formal peace operations should always be a priority, only a tiny fraction of staff members, women or men, are responsible for advancing gender equality concerns. Not only has women’s participation been a latecomer concern in international peace efforts, but it appears it is jettisoned quickly when inconvenient. At the June 2024 UN-brokered Doha talks between the Taliban and international envoys, there was a rapid acquiescence by the UN and representatives of Member States to the Taliban’s conditions for participation: they refused to include women in their delegation or to meet with Afghan women civil society exiles. Yet this did not disqualify them from participation.   

Conventional peacekeeping is clearly in retreat, and gender parity efforts in peace operations have seen setbacks. These setbacks are linked to reticence in implementing the UN’s commitments to centering gender equality in all aspects of its peace work. The impression that gender equality concerns are the first to be abandoned when there is resistance (as in the Taliban case), or when there is a resource crunch (when missions shrink), sends a devastating signal about how seriously the UN takes women’s rights. The flimsiness of commitments to the UN’s women, peace and security agenda more broadly also signals a vulnerability in the multilateral system to the intentions of illiberal actors seeking to erode commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion. If there is to be a ‘surge in parity’ in peace and security work, then women’s employment at all levels has to be protected from shocks such as downsizing. This can mean encouraging early retirement for men, and other measures to retain women. Beyond this, gender parity in peace work, as GR40 insists, cannot be separated from the determined implementation of agreements like UNSCR 1325 or CEDAW GR 30 on women in conflict situations.