Why the EU’s Women, Peace and Security Agenda is Stalling: Turning Rhetoric into Practice
By Owen Wong, Queen’s University
A person’s gender impacts the way they experience armed conflict. While men are often killed as armed combatants, women disproportionally suffer from displacement, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), and the economic damage associated with instability. Indeed, armed conflict lowers the life of the average woman more than the average man. UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 and the UN’s host of follow-up resolutions form the basis of what has become the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda.
The agenda focuses on improving women’s equality, ensuring their participation in the peace process, and protecting women and girls from violence. Recently it has been understood as a cutting-edge strategy to improve the operational effectiveness of military and civilian missions. In the European Union (EU), politicians and bureaucrats have jumped on the opportunity to improve the lives of women while simultaneously improving the capabilities of their security forces. Despite the political support, the agenda’s implementation fails to meet the goals set by politicians.
This article will describe how the EU has integrated the WPS agenda, diagnose two problems with its implementation, and suggest some tentative solutions to overcome these issues.
The EU’s approach to WPS boils down to four main ideas: improving the rank and representation of women in external affairs, integrating a gendered perspective throughout missions and operations, ending sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), and encouraging other countries to adopt the previous three goals. Despite the importance of the agenda, the implementation of WPS into the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) faces many roadblocks. This article will address two:
First, WPS is personality driven. When meaningful progress is made, it is often by specific senior individuals with a personal interest in pushing the agenda forward. If these individuals’ successors do not prioritize WPS, the agenda stalls. Although there is widespread recognition among senior management that promoting the tenets of WPS is part of their leadership responsibility, most senior managers barely engaged with the issue. A 2016 report published by the EU indicated that only 15% of senior managers engaged with WPS more than 15 times. 30% revealed they had not done so at all. The fact that WPS was acknowledged as important, yet inconsistently engaged with, reveals that the implementation of WPS relies on the personal conviction of leaders. Without a consistent implementation strategy, women’s equality and the operational effectiveness of missions suffer.
The second issue with implementation concerns the high turnover rate of staff working as Gender Advisors (GENADs) and Gender Focal Points (GFPs). GENADs typically work to integrate the tenets of WPS throughout the EU’s military and civilian missions and operations. They are typically high ranking and work with a network of focal points. GFPs are often attached to different mission branches. Their responsibility is to implement the advice of the Advisor into their respective departments.
Although these two actors are vital to the implementation of the WPS agenda, high GENAD and GFP turnover rates, paired with short contracts make it hard for meaningful work to occur. The high turnover rates mean that few gender staff have the experience-based knowledge of how to best implement the agenda. Furthermore, few GENADs and GFPs received handover notes from their predecessors. These transition notes can be invaluable to new GENADs and GFPs who may not have experience in the mission they are joining. Worse, in a 2016 survey of GENADs and GFPS, only 30% said they received mission-specific induction training that included gender.
While there are formal mechanisms such as annual mission reports that could be used to record lessons learned, the advice of GENADs is often excluded. For knowledge of best practices to be shared through formal reporting mechanisms, GENADs must produce special reports on their own initiative. These reports are time-intensive, non-mandatory, and require a significant amount of GENAD expertise to produce. Furthermore, these reports must be approved by officials in the EU’s External Action Service (EEAS). In short, these reports require the personal initiative of GENADs and may undergo a lengthy review process before they are published. It appears that knowledge sharing between GENADs and across posting periods is difficult. This difficulty stalls the agenda.
Not only does high turnover hinder the transfer of knowledge between new and old gender staff, but the short contracts that lead to high turnover are discouraging. Many staff members feel they can’t accomplish anything meaningful in such little time. As a result of poor knowledge transfer systems, and short contract times, projects that require time and expertise may not get off the ground.
The EU faces two internal issues to implementing WPS: the lack of a systemic commitment to the agenda among senior managers, and poor knowledge sharing among gender staff because of high turnover rates. How should these issues be overcome?
Concerning senior management, the EU can strive to build a culture that emphasizes the importance of the WPS agenda. It can begin by creating internal mandatory gender training for all EEAS managers, the staff of diplomatic services, and the heads of missions and operations. Next, it can ensure that job descriptions include duties associated with WPS. If job applicants understand the importance of the agenda from the beginning of their contract term they will be more likely to engage with it. Finally, senior managers ought to face periodic evaluations that include a component on their work towards gender mainstreaming.
To improve the diffusion of best practices among current gender staff, and the transfer of knowledge to new staff, the EU can improve its existing knowledge-sharing mechanisms. The EU has already established a yearly meeting for GENADs and GFPs as well as an email list. However, the infrequency of these meetings paired with the high turnover rate of gender staff means that many staff do not attend a meeting until late in their contract. In 2016, half the EU’s gender staff had not attended a meeting and most were not on the email list. It appears that the very mechanism designed for the informal consolidation and transfer of knowledge to the gender structure has not been working well. GENADs and GFPs who do attend the annual meeting emphasize its value, suggesting that the issue is not that the conference does not work, but that it occurs too infrequently.
COVID-19 has put the world online. In addition to the yearly in-person meeting, more frequent meetings of the gender staff could occur via Zoom. While online meetings cannot reproduce the value of in-person meetings, they could be a low-cost way of sharing lessons learned and best practices without going through the formal EU reporting mechanisms.
The EU has the political support for WPS. In practice, the implementation of the agenda falls short. By fostering a culture among senior managers that prioritizes WPS and by strengthening the existing mechanisms for informal knowledge sharing, the EU could transform its application of the agenda.
Owen Wong is a fourth-year undergraduate student in Political Studies and Economics at Queen’s University and Research Assistant at the Centre for International and Defence Policy. While Owen’s independent studies focus on the rise of populism and technocratic liberalism, this article stems from his work for the Canada Research Chair on Gender, Security, and the Armed Forces.
