The Gender Regime of International Security: Revisiting the Gap between National and Global Policies

More than one and a half decades after being launched, the ‘Women Peace and Security’ agenda that ensued from the approval of UNSC Resolution 1325 in 2000, has been evaluated as lagging behind its initial promise. Reports from the UN, NATO, the EU or OSCE have highlighted a variety of challenges that still hinder the effective implementation of the resolution and the ones that followed. Among these are a lack of awareness and slow progress concerning the development of a gender perspective in international operations and the still limited inclusion of women at the various levels of conflict management and peace processes. In this presentation, I review those various challenges and focus on one critical factor: the articulation (or the gap) between national policies on gender mainstreaming and integration in military forces and the gender policies of international security organizations. Based on available empirical information from a variety of case studies and more general reports, the paper puts forward the idea that the disjuncture between these policy levels explains, to a large extent, the problems that have been identified. Accordingly, it calls for greater attention being attached to national state policies and the need to strengthen tools and mechanisms for effective articulation between global goals and national policy-making.