The role of gender in the UN’s counterterrorism reforms
By: Ann-Kathrin Rothermel
During the United Nations’ (UN) second global Counter-Terrorism Week, scheduled for early July 2020, member states and UN staff had planned to review the implementation of the Global Counterterrorism Strategy (2006) and the subsequent reforms at UN and member state level. Over the past 20 years, major reforms have led to significant shifts from kinetic, military-based approaches towards more preventive, social, or ‘soft’ counterterrorism in the form ‘countering and preventing violent extremism’ (P/CVE) programs and an increasing emphasis on mainstreaming gender issues into counterterrorism.
While the Global Counter-Terrorism Week has been postponed and is currently replaced by an alternative virtual event focusing on Countering Terrorism in the context of a global pandemic, it still marks a welcome occasion to critically reflect upon what the merging of gender and counterterrorism in the context of P/CVE has meant for the UN’s counterterrorism and gender agendas. For this blogpost, I draw on my article in IFjP, in which I analyze how gender representations in the P/CVE agenda are based on preexisting gendered discourses in the UN’s security and development pillars. These discourses are brought together in the context of P/CVE, which results in important contradictions and challenges, but also offers potential opportunities for change to those affected by them.
Gender in P/CVE: ‘glue’ between UN agendas or in danger of securitization?
“Drones, airstrikes, and boots on the ground can halt the advance of extremist groups, but these tools cannot defeat radical ideologies nor build resilient families and communities. Empowered women are the best drivers of growth and the best hope for reconciliation. They are the best buffer against the radicalization of youth and the repetition of cycles of violence. Women and girls are the first targets of attack — the promotion of their rights must be the first priority in response”. (Mlambo-Ngcuka and Coomaraswamy 2015)
The inclusion of women and gender into counterterrorism in the context of P/CVE has been interpreted in two different ways. One take is apparent in the quote above by UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and Radhika Coomaraswamy, lead author of the Global Study on the Implementation of Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. Based on women’s unique position as ‘buffers’, resilience- and community-builders, the inclusion of women in counterterrorism considerations offers a previously untapped opportunity to devise better ways to prevent attacks. More recently, both P/CVE and the increasing coupling of counterterrorism with gender agendas, such as the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS) have increasingly come under critique. Critics have particularly highlighted that the connection that is made between women and counterterrorism may end up instrumentalizing and securitizing gender equality agendas, such as WPS.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and other speakers at the GA71 side event on Countering Violent Extremism, 2016, Photo by UN Women/Ryan Brown, CC –BY-NC-ND 2.0,
Whether viewed as positive ‘glue’ between the two sectors, or as danger of overriding gains in both development and social policy and gender equality agendas, what is often overlooked in this debate is that the particular position of gender between security and development is built on a much longer history of gender mainstreaming. For feminist analysis and activism, this means that we can draw on a range of previous feminist work to better understand, criticize and make use of what we know about gendered silences, practices and effects, which are now seeping into counterterrorism policy-making and practice.
Women and gender in P/CVE between passive victimhood and active peacemakers
For example, feminists working on women’s role in peace and security have long criticized the simplistic association of women with peace, which overrides the many cases in which women have in fact been essential to violent action. As I show in my article, in P/CVE this association is combined with a high expectation for women to provide their communities with peace and resilience to radicalization. This expectation, in turn, is a common theme in development discourses, which have been criticized by feminist scholars for not taking into account systemic barriers and burdens as well as colonial trajectories. That both women’s role as victims and powerful deradicalizers have become integral parts of gender representations in P/CVE and UN counterterrorism shows how different gendered securitizing and developmentalizing logics persist and become merged in UN counterterrorism reforms. In the context of this merger, however, different levels of power, resources and agency are uncritically ascribed to presumably the same women, sometimes within the same documents, which results in simultaneous policy foci on protection and empowerment. These tensions place contradictory expectations on the implementers of P/CVE programming as well as on those affected by it.
Of course, any analysis of global agenda-setting discourses at the UN level can only go so far in assessing the real-life implications of the merging of security and development in P/CVE. However, at the occasion of the UN Counter-Terrorism Week, focusing on the tensions that are inherent in the agenda itself offers a new perspective on both challenges and opportunities in UN counterterrorism reforms. While women’s agency is constrained in different ways by both the heroine and victim narrative, acknowledging the multiplicity of roles for women, as well as the very different levels of power, and resulting policy foci might provide spaces for a more realistic engagement with the diversity of lived experiences. In this way, it is precisely the tensions, exclusions and contradictions in the agenda, which might open up spaces for renegotiation, contestation, resistance and reconstruction for those, who are often considered to be the peace-builders, community-organizers, enablers, de-radicalizers, victims, economic facilitators and protectors at its margins.
Read the full article: Gendered representations in the United Nations’ agenda to Prevent and Counter Violent Extremism
Each blog post gives the views of the individual author(s) based on their published IFJP article. All posts published on ifjpglobal.org remain the intellectual property and copyright of the author or authors.
Ann-Kathrin Rothermel is a research associate and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Potsdam. Her research focuses on the role of gender in both radicalization into extremist movements as well as counterterrorism and de-radicalization. She is a research affiliate at the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational and Regional Studies (BGTS) and a fellow with the Institute of Research on Male Supremacism (IRMS).