The Women, Peace and Security Agenda in United Nations Mediation
Twenty years ago this October, the UN adopted the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. A series of Security Council resolutions called for the inclusion of women and gender issues in all aspects of peace and security decision making. This includes the mediation of conflicts where the UN acts as the third party. As one advocate for the WPS Agenda noted: "1325 is potentially revolutionary as it could transform ways of understanding how security is conceived, protected and enforced. It could make photos of only male leaders at peace negotiating tables starkly outdated."
Intra Syrian Talks 2017
However, progress in including women and gender in UN-brokered peace processes has been patchy. Although the adoption of the WPS Agenda has been associated with an increase in the gender content of peace agreements, the inclusion of women, non-binary people or gender issues in mediation still lags behind. This means that many people are left out of making decisions that may have serious effects on how they lead their lives. While policy and academic research has focused on the implementation of the WPS Agenda in key international institutions like peacebuilding or peacekeeping, we don't yet have a good sense of why UN mediation in particular has trouble with the WPS Agenda. This is vexing as the UN is one of the key authors of the Agenda.
Logics of UN Mediation: "Art" and "Science"
Throughout this project I seek to “de-mythologize” UN mediation by uncovering its assumptions and examining their implications for addressing gendered injustice. I add to our knowledge by examining how the UN understands its mediation work. I argue that these self-understandings -- which we can observe in narratives about the ends and means of UN mediation -- can tell us a lot about where and why gender gets excluded. Based on extensive analysis of UN policy documents on UN mediation, interviews with mediation practitioners, and observation of mediation activities such as training workshops, my work examines the dominant narratives that shape UN mediation.
I focus on how narratives of UN mediation have changed over time. Early UN mediation developed from diplomatic methods of managing and resolving interstate conflicts. According to Elodie Convergne, mediators traditionally thought of their work as a diplomatic “art, not a science” something that could be learned through experience rather than structured training. This approach emphasizes an intrinsic feel for the game, personal charisma, and the importance of building relationships with conflict parties.
However, this approach to mediation came increasingly under attack. UN personnel saw the practice of mediation as a diplomatic art as inadequate to the challenges of post-Cold War conflicts and efforts to professionalize mediation began. Secretary-General Kofi Annan strengthened the UN's mediation capacity through efforts to produce guidance documents, training, and expertise in mediation. These have all contributed to redefining UN mediation as a "science", not an art. These texts underscore the importance of a professional, specialized, and technical approach to conflict resolution.
Implications for the WPS Agenda
The new "scientific" approach to UN mediation has not totally displaced earlier narratives. Field-based staff and senior mediators continue to underscore the importance of relationships, an inherent "feel for the game", and informality in their work. This means these approaches to UN mediation co-exist, presenting a dual challenge for the implementation of the WPS Agenda.
The narrative of UN mediation as a science has been successful in co-opting the WPS Agenda as another area of expert knowledge. Knowledge about "gender" or "local women" is seen as helpful in legitimating peace processes, as well as providing better information about conflict dynamics. However, gender expertise, when it is divorced from feminist analysis, is a problematic strategy for transformation. It depoliticizes knowledge about how conflict and intersecting forms of oppression are mutually constitutive. Moreover, because mediation is increasingly seen as an "expert" endeavor, this provides a reason to marginalize local women from participation. Local women are represented as lacking the "capacity" for appropriate engagement with substantive issues. One implication is the increasing use of consultative mechanisms to gather information, in place of meaningful participation.
Meeting Syrian Women Advisory board with Staffan De Mistura, Special Envoy UN for Syria, Geneva, 2016.03.22. UN photo / Anne-Laure Lechat
The narrative of UN mediation as an art tends to exclude women and gender. Because of its focus on relationships and fostering the consent of negotiating parties, issues and actors outside of those narrowly understood to be relevant to the "hard" security problems at hand are seen as distracting or risky. Moreover, the reputation of senior mediators relies upon the perception that they have good political judgment. The exercise of this judgment means that mediators often have to arbitrate between different norms surrounding conflict resolution. As yet, exercising one's discretion in favor of implementing the WPS Agenda is not necessarily seen as good judgment, unless it can be linked to the achievement of another political goal, such as exercising leverage over the conflict parties.
Repoliticizing the WPS Agenda in UN Mediation
Looking at narratives about UN mediation reveals competition within the institution to define its work. This has different implications for the WPS Agenda: the narrative of UN mediation as a "science" tends to co-opt or marginalize the Agenda, while the narrative of it as an "art" results in the exclusion of women and gender issues.
As feminists, we should wonder which options this leaves for achieving justice in the midst of conflict. Strategies focused on increasing gender expertise or enumerating different kinds of "inclusion mechanisms" run the risk of becoming tools to facilitate peace processes. This is different from the work needed to transform violent and conflicted relationships, which is deeply political. While the narrative of UN mediation as an art excludes women in overt ways, it does center the political urgency of relationships. I believe this provides a fruitful starting point for reclaiming conflict resolution and the WPS Agenda from technical governance and reorienting them toward the realization of peace.
Read the full article: Caught between art and science: the Women, Peace and Security agenda in United Nations mediation narratives
Dr Catriona Standfield is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Kroc Center for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. From Fall 2020, she will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Worcester State University. Her research focuses on UN mediation, diplomacy, and gender, using narrative and practice approaches.
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