WPS, Gender and Foreign Military Interveners: Experience from Iraq and Afghanistan

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) represents emerging recognition of the importance of ‘women’s’ participation in building peace in conflict-affected societies. However, it is premised on universal female experiences of conflict, and of common priorities in peacebuilding and social reform. This overlooks the individual characters of women as political, economic, religious and cultural actors in their own societies, with their own agendas. As a result, military interveners who rely on WPS doctrine, without a detailed understanding of specific gender issues in the subject community, face significant risk that their reforms may fail as aids to peace. Nonetheless, WPS crystallised interest in gender-focused reforms by military forces. Experience in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003 has spanned gender-focused electoral reform and gendered security enforcement through ‘Lioness Teams’ in Iraq, to a more ambitious programme of ‘Female Engagement Teams’ in Afghanistan. It has brought the risks of failure into sharp relief, and demands rapid progress towards a more nuanced understanding of women as individuals if WPS is to have long-term effect. A closer partnership with feminist theorists, who have debated essentialism and universalism for a generation, may smooth this difficult path. This is the next challenge in understanding war not just as a gendered experience, but an individual one.