Smart peacekeeping: Deploying Canadian women for a better peace?
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Author | Sandra Biskupski-Mujanovic |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702019874791 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Scholarly Essay |
Scholarly Essay
Smart peacekeeping:
Deploying Canadian
women for a better
peace?
Sandra Biskupski-Mujanovic
Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research, Western
University, London, Ontario, Canada
Abstract
Canada announced its renewed commitment to United Nations peacekeeping with a
special mission to increase the representation of women through the Elsie Initiative.
That announcement marks a crucial time to examine peacekeeping as a gendered project
that requires reflection on power and inequality between states and peacekeepers
through an intersectional analysis that pays attention to gender and race. The major
justification for increasing the number of women in peacekeeping operations has
remained instrumental: deploying more women will lead to kinder, gentler, less abusive,
and more efficient missions. However, there is little empirical evidence to support these
claims. This paper looks at Canadian peacekeeping and arguments for women’sincreased
representation in peacekeeping operations for improved operational effectiveness as a
‘‘smart’’ peacekeeping strategy. It looks at the contradictions and controversies in
Canadian peacekeeping and gender and smart peacekeeping that includes the Women,
Peace, and Security agenda in general and within Canada, operational effectiveness claims,
militarized masculinity, and militarized femininity. Without qualitative empirical data from
Canadian women peacekeepers themselves, smart peacekeeping claims, which ‘‘add
women and stir,’’ are largely anecdotal and do not adequately facilitate meaningful change.
Keywords
Peacekeeping, gender, Canada, inequality, race
International Journal
2019, Vol. 74(3) 405–421
!The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702019874791
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Corresponding author:
Sandra Biskupski-Mujanovic, Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research, Western University,
1151 Richmond Street, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada.
Email: sbiskups@uwo.ca
Introduction
Canada announced its renewed commitment to United Nations (UN) peacekeeping
with a special mission to increase the representation of women through the Elsie
Initiative at the 2017 UN Peacekeeping Defence Ministerial in Vancouver. That
announcement marks a crucial time to examine peacekeeping as a gendered project,
‘‘defined, conceptualized and structuredin terms of a distinction between masculinity
and femininity, presuming and inevitably reproducin g gender differences.’’
1
Renewed
interest in peacekeeping offers an opportunity to contend with ideas of power and
inequality between states and peacekeepers through an intersectional analysis that
pays attention to gender and race among other dimensions that influence peace-
keepers’ experiences. The major justification for increasing the number of women
in peacekeeping operations has remained instrumental: it is frequently said that
deploying more women will lead to kinder, gentler, less abusive, and more efficient
missions.
2
However, there is little empirical e vidence to support these claims, and this
gap demonstrates a need for more critical gender analysis of peacekeeping.
This paper draws on a literature review that includes both peer-reviewed schol-
arship and journalistic coverage on peacekeeping, with a specific focus on Canada
and gender. It looks at Canadian peacekeeping and the arguments for women’s
increased representation in peacekeeping operations for improved operational
effectiveness as a ‘‘smart’’ peacekeeping strategy.
Sylvia Chant and Caroline Sweetman theorize ‘‘smart economics’’ that ‘‘ration-
alize ‘investing’ in women and girls for more effective development outcomes.’’
3
They argue that women’s empowerment and gender equality have been taken up as
goals that make economic sense. This framework can be extended to peacekeeping,
where the push for women’s increased representation is not primarily about equal-
ity; it is about improving security outcomes. Women are treated as vehicles to
improve operational effectiveness; their inclusion is expected to improve the under-
lying gender issues within the peacekeeping project in general. Chant and
Sweetman argue that ‘‘it is imperative to ask whether the goal of female investment
is primarily to promote gender equality and women’s ‘empowerment,’ or to facili-
tate development ‘on the cheap,’ and/or to promote further economic liberaliza-
tion.’’
4
The logic behind ‘‘smart economics’’ is that women pick up the slack where
institutions fail to do so—institutions that are not only complicit in perpetuating
assumptions about who women are and what change they can bring about, but that
also, according to Raewyn Connell, ‘‘institutionalize definitions of femininity and
1. Helena Carreiras, ‘‘Gendered culture in peacekeeping operations,’’ International Peacekeeping 17,
no. 4 (2010): 472.
2. Bipasha Baruah, ‘‘Short-sighted commitments on women in peacekeeping,’’ Policy Options,23
November 2017, https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/november-2017/short-sighted-commit
ments-on-women-in-peacekeeping/ (accessed 15 January 2019).
3. Sylvia Chant and Caroline Sweetman, ‘‘Fixing women or fixing the world? ‘Smart economics,’
efficiency approaches, and gender equality in development,’’ Gender & Development 20, no. 3
(2012): 518.
4. Ibid., 521.
406 International Journal 74(3)
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