Shopping cartGlobal Responsibility to Protect
Volumes & issues:
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List of Contributors
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GR2P Special Issue: The Responsibility to Protect and Sexual and Gender Based violence (SGBV)
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Mapping Gender and the Responsibility to Protect: Seeking Intersections, Finding Parallels *
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Over the past decade, the international community has acknowledged that traditional notions of conflict and protection must be re-visited if true human security is to be realized. Consistent with this recognition, both the responsibility to protect and the women, peace, and security agenda challenge the status quo and offer new perspectives from which to approach responses to conflict. Unfortunately, the former was developed without consideration of the latter, and a tremendous opportunity to benefit from years of experience and expertise was thus missed. This article demonstrates that while recent discourse surrounding the responsibility to protect suggests some increased awareness that conflict affects men and women differently, there remains a significant disconnect between the development of this framework and the ever-growing body of work on the gendered nature of peace and security issues. Our identification of this ongoing chasm is accompanied by two simple observations: first, that this renders the responsibility to protect inconsistent with other international commitments and priorities; and second, that incorporation of the links between gender and conflict will improve the ability of the responsibility to protect to afford true protection.
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Responsibility to Protect or Prevent? Victims and Perpetrators of Sexual Violence Crimes in Armed Conflicts
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The main argument in this article is that the academic as well as policy related focus on sexual violence has brought women’s concerns to the table of international security concerns, namely to the United Nations Security Council through a number of resolutions in recent years. This has been important in order to create better protection measures and bring women’s agency to the forefront of political concern. However, the woman centered focus on protection measures might have overshadowed the role of the perpetrators of sexual violence crimes and the need to focus on prevention measures.
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The Responsibility to Protect: Integrating Gender Perspectives into Policies and Practices *
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Despite the fact that the development of the R2P principle has occurred in parallel to significant developments in the field of gender on the international scene, gender remains a neglected topic in the central documents and debates related to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). There is therefore a need to consider how gender may be integrated into R2P policies and practices. This article suggests that this discussion may be structured around two gender perspectives, which are guided by the questions of ‘where are the women?’ and ‘how does gender work?’ respectively. The first gender perspective involves identifying women’s experiences in connection with mass atrocities and taking into account their role as agents in the commissioning, as well as the prevention of, and protection against, such atrocities. The second gender perspective involves investigating what work gender is doing in the context of mass atrocities. Here, the focus is specifically on sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and how this is based on, and serves to maintain or reinforce, certain notions of femininity and masculinity. Based on these two gender perspectives, the article presents a series of recommendations for the development of R2P policies and practices.
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Engendering the Responsibility to Protect: Women and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities
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This article explores the relationship between the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the pursuit of the so-called ‘Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) agenda at the UN. We ask whether the two agendas should continue to be pursued separately or whether each can make a useful contribution to the other. We argue that while the history of R2P has not included language that deliberately evokes the protection of women and the promotion of gender in preventing genocide and mass atrocities, this does not preclude the R2P and WPS agendas becoming mutually reinforcing. The article identifies cross-cutting areas where the two agendas may be leveraged for the UN and member states to address the concerns of women as both actors in need of protection and active agents in preventing and responding to genocide and mass atrocities, namely in the areas of early warning.
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Gender-Sensitive Protection and the Responsibility to Prevent: Lessons from Chad
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Helping states to fulfil their duty to protect their citizens and those seeking refuge within the sovereign terrain of the given state belongs to the second pillar of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The R2P concept, however, relates as much to preventing mass atrocities as to halt already on-going ones. This article emphasises the gender dimensions of prevention of and protection against violence and other threats, in order to stress the importance of implementing and mainstreaming gender into R2P. The case study of interest here is the UN support mission to Chad and the Central African Republic (MINURCAT) that provided a fairly encouraging, albeit short-lived, example of gender-responsive prevention and protection measures at the community level for refugees and IDPs in eastern Chad. Chad exemplifies a case with low-intensity conflicts and responses made at the local level, like the MINURCAT-supported community conflict resolution initiative, proved constructive in preventing violent responses. Here, deliberate integration of female police officers was a first step towards facilitating contact with women not allowed to talk to male strangers. Further, ensuring gender training for the entire police unit as an integrated part of their protection responsibility helped in avoiding male-as-norm approaches. The forced withdrawal of the UN was questioned as premature. However, the security situation has remained fairly stable, and the government seems able to provide at least some of the more hard-end forms of protection measures, although rule of law and other forms of protection for vulnerable groups remain elusive in eastern Chad.
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Implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1325: Putting the Responsibility to Protect into Practice
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Although the principle of the Responsibility to Protect has a number of supporters, there is still little agreement on institutional procedures to execute Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) systematically. This is due to a lack of consensus on how exactly to operationalize specific RtoP practices with regard to genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. The acceptance of this line of thinking is peculiar in its ignorance of the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (UN 1325) on Women, Peace and Security, by militaries, both national and multinational, over the last five to ten years. Misunderstanding, underutilization, and neglect of the UN 1325 mandate within the RtoP community has caused many important developments in the field to be overlooked. This article attempts to begin filling that gap. It presents an overview of what UN 1325 is about and compares UN 1325 to the Responsibility to Protect agenda. It also examines how implementing UN 1325 in UN and NATO peace and security operations is pushing the RtoP agenda forward in practical, not theoretical, terms in three key areas of military peace and security operations – the transformation of doctrine, command structure, and capabilities.
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