The Practical is the Political: The UN’s Global Study on Women, Peace and Security
Weighing in at just under five pounds, the 417-page Global Study on the Implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, released last month, is nothing if not ambitious.[As to] whether its recommendations are sufficiently concrete, and bought into widely enough, to stand a decent chance of real-world adoption…the Global Study is already a resounding success: some of its key recommendations were incorporated into a Security Council resolution (UNSCR 2242) the day before the report itself was launched. Other proposals emerging from the study will be the subject of high-level internal UN deliberations in the weeks and months ahead. To cite these practical implications is not to damn the report’s analytical quality with faint praise. Both the issues and reform proposals in, for example, Chapter 6 (on peacekeeping) are closely argued, and the study’s ability to combine internal UN information with the findings of social-science research is impressive.
The institutional and policy reforms proposed in the Global Study are directed at the usual range of stakeholders – UN departments and agencies, aid donors, member states in general, the Security Council, civil society organizations, the media – and cover everything from increasing women’s political participation in post-conflict countries to addressing gender-discrimination within traditional justice mechanisms. The broad canvas is altogether fitting given that the report was tasked with reviewing a decade and a half of progress on advancing the objectives of Resolution 1325 since its passage in 2000, including efforts to implement the many “women, peace and security” (WPS) resolutions adopted in the intervening years. Broad-spectrum coverage is also strategic: addressing a wider range of subjects and conceptual framings provides opportunities for a more diverse array of WPS advocates within and outside the UN to advance their specific agendas, whether these involve the rights of women refugees (Chapter 12) or reforms to how humanitarian services are delivered (Chapter 4).
[Read full article the Global Peace Operations Review site]
