Gender and Peacebuilding: What the Evidence Shows

Gender and peacebuilding became inseparable subjects in October 2000, when the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. The resolution recognised, as a matter of international peace and security, that women must participate in peace processes and that women and girls need protection from the violations that accompany armed conflict. A decade later, a three-year research programme led by International Alert, working with the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) and the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO), took stock of what had actually changed on the ground.

The verdict, published in a December 2010 synthesis report by Charlotte Onslow, Steven Schoofs and Sarah Maguire, was sobering. Despite resolutions, declarations and national commitments, women remained largely absent from peace negotiations, and sexual violence still marked the conflicts of the day. The researchers drew on fieldwork in Nepal, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Liberia, Georgia and Abkhazia to answer a harder question: not why gender matters in peacebuilding, but how, concretely, international actors can act on it.

From “nice to have” to mission critical

The report’s central complaint is that a gender-sensitive approach to peacebuilding continued to be treated as optional. Donors and mission planners accepted the normative case for equality but struggled to see what practical difference a gender analysis made to their work. The synthesis set out to close that gap with evidence from the field.

Its answer starts with governance. Peacebuilding is a long-term process of strengthening the capacity of societies and institutions to manage conflict without violence. Where half the population is excluded from decision-making, accountability between state and citizen stays weak, and the institutions being rebuilt risk reproducing the exclusions that fed the original conflict. Post-conflict recovery offers a rare chance to rebuild better rather than simply rebuild. Women’s participation is one of the clearest tests of whether that chance is taken.

The researchers were equally blunt about lazy shortcuts. An “add women and stir” approach achieves little. Their fieldwork produced a list of caveats that still reads as a corrective to much policy language:

• Women’s civil society organisations complement, but cannot substitute for, women’s direct participation in formal decision-making.
• The presence of women in parliaments does not guarantee that women’s concerns are represented at all.
• Women who do want to act face obstacles ranging from threats of violence to the burden of unpaid care work.
• A critical mass matters, but numbers alone are not enough; women in office often belong to the same elites as their male colleagues.
• Men can and should represent women’s interests too. When male MPs in Rwanda joined female colleagues against gender-based violence, legislation followed.

“Just because I am a woman, I will not fight for women’s rights.” The words of a Bosnian minister of foreign trade in 2002, quoted in the synthesis, capture why assumptions about women as natural peacebuilders mislead policy.

What UNSCR 1325 asks of security and justice reform

UNSCR 1325 does more than call for women at the negotiating table. Operational Paragraph 8 names justice and security as priority areas for women’s participation, and Paragraph 10 directs attention to the protection of women and girls within security sector reform. The synthesis argues that this is where a gender perspective earns its keep most visibly, because public confidence in police, courts and the military decides whether citizens trust the state at all.

In both Nepal and Liberia, the underlying country studies found that security institutions had been part of the deterioration that led to war. Unless those institutions were reformed and seen to be reformed, the whole government risked being perceived as no different from the old days. The Nepal research put it plainly.

“If individuals and communities do not see an improvement in their day-to-day security then they are unlikely to back any national, Kathmandu-led initiatives.”

The practical entry points identified in the report include institutional policy and personnel conduct, gender-disaggregated data for security planning, community engagement, and the recruitment and retention of women across security and justice institutions. In Liberia, researchers found that women’s immediate concerns related more to safety at home and in the community than to national security, and that near silence from the security and justice sectors had left sexual and gender-based violence treated as “no big deal”. Planning that ignores such data misses the threats people actually face. A fuller account of the reform agenda appears in the study on transitional justice and security system reform, and the companion research on responding to people’s security needs reaches similar conclusions from a different angle.

Gender issues in Burundi: community policing that worked

Among the case studies, Burundi supplied one of the most encouraging examples of how gender issues can be addressed in practice. A community-based security programme supported by the UN Peacebuilding Fund was implemented by Dushirahamwe, a local women’s organisation, and a network of more than 20 Burundian civil society organisations came together to press for more gender-sensitive peacebuilding.

Their recommendations were concrete rather than rhetorical: integrate the protection of women and girls into the French and Kirundi versions of police training manuals; hold periodic meetings between police and communities in which women can speak freely; and collect gender-disaggregated data on who attends trainings and sensitisation meetings. The research found that increasing communication between the police and women eased communication between the police and society as a whole, and that recognising women’s need for justice kept reform focused on civilians rather than on hardware. The broader trajectory of that country’s recovery is examined in the journal’s coverage of peacebuilding in Burundi.

How far the EU had come by 2010

The European Union was the report’s main addressee. Its 2008 Comprehensive Approach to implementing Resolutions 1325 and 1820 committed the EU to integrating women, peace and security issues into political dialogue, mainstreaming gender across policies, and funding targeted actions for women’s protection and empowerment. By 2010 the EU had adopted 17 indicators to track implementation and set up an informal task force across institutions and member states. Ten EU member states had adopted National Action Plans since 2006, out of 24 states worldwide.

Momentum at the global level was real. Resolution 1820, passed in 2008, recognised sexual violence as a security issue in its own right, and Margot Wallström was appointed the first Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Yet the synthesis insisted that external action would only be as credible as internal practice: an EU that trains partner governments on 1325 must also train its own staff, resource its own missions with gender expertise, and fund women’s organisations for the long haul. The follow-on recommendations are developed in detail in the companion analysis of how the EU can improve its responses to gender and peacebuilding.

What the evidence adds up to

Three conclusions organise the report’s agenda for action. First, strengthen the institutional set-up: gender expertise cannot sit in a single advisor’s job description while planning documents ignore it. Second, build the capacity to deliver, from training for mission personnel to gender analysis in country strategies. Third, make the investments and align resources so that commitments on paper produce impact on the ground, including direct support to national gender-equality machineries, legislative reform anchored in instruments such as CEDAW, and support to women’s organisations, media and electoral processes.

Fifteen years on, the framework the report described has grown into ten Security Council resolutions and more than a hundred national action plans, tracked by UN Women’s Women, Peace and Security programme. The gap the researchers identified has narrowed less. Women’s share of negotiating roles in major peace processes remains low, which keeps the 2010 findings uncomfortably current. The evidence assembled in Burundi, Liberia and Nepal still offers the same lesson: gender-sensitive peacebuilding is not a parallel agenda but a test of whether peacebuilding is working at all. Readers interested in how these findings translated into transitional justice practice can start with the case study on gender and transitional justice in Liberia, or browse the journal’s gender and peacebuilding section.

Frequently asked questions

What is UNSCR 1325?

UN Security Council Resolution 1325, adopted in October 2000, is the founding text of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. It calls for women’s participation at all levels of decision-making on peace and security, for the protection of women and girls during and after armed conflict, and for a gender perspective in peacekeeping, negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction.

What does gender and peacebuilding mean in practice?

It means analysing how conflict and recovery affect women and men differently, and designing programmes accordingly. In practice this covers women’s participation in peace talks and governance, gender-sensitive reform of police and courts, protection from sexual and gender-based violence, and support to women’s organisations in conflict-affected countries.

Why is women’s participation considered essential for lasting peace?

Institutions that exclude half the population tend to lack accountability and legitimacy, which undermines the state-society trust that peace depends on. Research synthesised in 2010 found that including women improves the quality of governance overall and helps ensure rebuilt institutions do not reproduce pre-war exclusions.

Does putting more women in parliament automatically advance women’s rights?

No. The research warns against this assumption. Women in office may not prioritise women’s concerns, may face resistance from peers, or may belong to the same elites as male colleagues. Numbers matter, but they work only alongside political will, civil society pressure and engaged male allies.

What were the main gender issues in Burundi’s peacebuilding process?

Key issues included women’s exclusion from security decision-making and weak police responsiveness to women’s concerns. A Peacebuilding Fund programme run by the women’s organisation Dushirahamwe promoted community policing, gender content in French and Kirundi police training manuals, and regular police-community meetings where women could speak freely.

What is gender-sensitive security sector reform?

It is reform of police, military and justice institutions that accounts for the different security needs of women, men, girls and boys. It includes recruiting and retaining women in the security services, collecting gender-disaggregated data for planning, preventing and prosecuting sexual violence, and building oversight mechanisms open to women.

What is the EU’s Comprehensive Approach to Resolution 1325?

Adopted in 2008, the Comprehensive Approach is the EU framework for implementing Resolutions 1325 and 1820. It commits the EU to raising women, peace and security in political dialogue, mainstreaming gender across external policies and funding targeted actions, tracked since 2010 through 17 dedicated indicators.

What is a National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security?

A National Action Plan (NAP) is a government strategy that sets out how a country will implement Resolution 1325, ideally with specific measures, timelines, benchmarks and accountability mechanisms. By late 2010, 24 countries had adopted NAPs, including ten EU member states; today more than a hundred exist worldwide.

How does sexual and gender-based violence obstruct peacebuilding?

Beyond its immediate harm, SGBV suppresses participation: the threat of violence can stop women voting, standing for office or reporting crimes, which weakens elections and the rule of law. Resolution 1820, adopted in 2008, formally recognised sexual violence in conflict as a matter of international security.

Which countries did the 2010 gender and peacebuilding research cover?

The synthesis drew on qualitative and quantitative studies conducted in Nepal, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Liberia and Georgia, as well as Abkhazia. Nine research papers produced between 2007 and 2010 fed into the final report.