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Gender and Disarmament

"In particular, women's organizations have often played a vital role--from the Hague peace conferences of the 19th century to the present time. The role of women in the maintenance and promotion of peace and security was recognized by the Security Council in Resolution 1325 (2000). Women have rightly observed that armament policies and the use of armed force have often been influenced by misguided ideas about masculinity and strength. An understanding of and emancipation from this traditional perspective might help to remove some of the hurdles on the road to disarmament and nonproliferation."

-Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission
chaired by former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, in
Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms
page 160, 1 June 2006

WILPF's work for disarmament

Complete, transparent, and democratic disarmament has been one of the goals of WILPF since it's inception in 1915. WILPF has played an integral role in the Special Sessions on Disarmament, in the Non Proliferation Treaty conferences, and in the Conference on Disarmament. Within the overall framework of Building a Culture of Peace, one of WILPF's three main interlinked areas, developed with a gender perspective, is the promotion of peace and security through Disarmament, Demilitarization, and Global Governance. WILPF has long recognized the connection between gender, patriarchy, and militarism.

As noted by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) and the UN Department for Disarmament Affairs, women play a crucial role in promoting global disarmament, and gender perspective affect the way society views weapons, war and militarism. WILPF member Carol Cohn, with Reaching Critical Will founder Felicity Hill, and Sara Ruddick were commissioned to write a paper on this connection for the WMDC, and produced the excellent "The Relevance of Gender for Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction." Reaching Critical Will, with its civil society partners, published a book, Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security?, in response to the WMDC Report, which included a chapter on gender and disarmament.

WILPF's Reaching Critical Will project provides information services that better inform and enable women to contribute to some of the most inaccessible and technically challenging fora in international peace and security - the negotiations on weapons. This role of Reaching Critical Will is in accordance with Security Council Resolution 1325, which recognizes the under-valued and under-utilized contributions women make to conflict prevention, peacekeeping, conflict resolution and peace-building, and stressed the importance of their equal and full participation as active agents in peace and security. It is in this vein that we seek to promote women's involvement in the Non-Proliferation Treaty reviews and other major disarmament fora.

The PeaceWomen project of WILPF is guided by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom's aims and principles, policies and resolutions, developed over an 86 year period by women devoted to ending war and militarism. This project aims to prioritise information about and services for women in conflict zones, pre-conflict zones, and post-conflict zones.

WILPF aims to bring together women of different political, philosophical convictions united in their determination to study, make known, and help abolish the causes and the concept of war. WILPF works towards world peace, total and universal disarmament, the abolition of violence and coercion in the settlement of conflicts and the substitution in each case of negotiation and conciliation. It also seeks to strengthen the United Nations and its family of Specialised Agencies, and the institutions of international law. WILPF strives for political and social equality, economic equity, cooperation among all people and for sustainable development and environmental protection.

WILPF perspectives on disarmament
Statement by Felicity Hill, Vice President of WILPF

Over the years WILPF has been caught between the women's and the peace movement because the organization has brought a gender analysis to the peace movement and a peace analysis to the women's movement.

The historical links between feminism and pacifism are counterbalanced when women have embraced revolution with hope and war with enthusiasm. There has not been a consistent women's response to war and WILPF has always been pretty firm in a non-essentialist position, meaning that we do not believe that women and men are inherently peaceful or warlike, but that social and cultural structures value and encourage certain roles and behaviours expressed as masculinity and femininity. This is what is meant by gender - it is not about sex, or about men and women, it is socially constructed roles and behaviours that are labeled masculine or feminine that can be, and should be, deconstructed.

War, however, is a "gendered" activity. After childbirth war-making has possibly been the most segregated of activities along gender lines. The vast majority of the fighters are men. Armed forces and military factions are generally male institutions - in numbers and in culture. It's no surprise then that wielding weapons has accumulated social and cultural meaning. Alternatively, women as civilians are more likely than soldiers to be killed during armed conflict. While all civilians suffer when war breaks out, it is women and girls that face the most risk and danger - not just the risk of being killed or injured, but also of being raped, sexually assaulted, or abused. All at the hands of men with guns. Women, cast in a certain role, are also used as a symbol of justification for war. Women need protection as they are the nations most valuable possession, the principle vehicle for transmitting the nations values, bearers of future generation, are most vulnerable to defilement and are most susceptible to assimilation.

Yet, women are generally absent from official initiatives to end conflicts and their voices are missing from decisions on priorities in peace processes. When they do get to speak, disarmament is called for loudly. The women in Liberia demanded disarmament before elections because elections taking place under militarised conditions are not free nor fair. They took the weapons out of the hands of men and boys at depots all over their country. Two weeks ago, women rallied in eastern DR Congo and their first call was for disarmament because without disarmament they know that nobody is safe and that negotiations cannot begin. In Sierra Leone the Women's Forum met with Security Council delegates when they visited and they raised the issue of disarmament in terms of the demobilisation of women soldiers whose needs are not addressed in the demobilisation programmes that are generally designed for men, and they also called for the systematic disarmament of the RUF, a difficult task but essential if these thugs are to stop the violence. We know of the successes of disarmament in places like Mali - many of the weapons burnt in that famous fire were brought out of their communities by women. Also the women in Albania had a special interest in getting the weapons out of the communities. The development for disarmament deal has worked. A poll done by WILPF Albania in three small villages found that women experienced an increased level of violence and coercion because of the presence of weapons. They had been threatened with these weapons by their husbands, sons and brothers and along side the development promises, this was a major factor motivating the disarmament process.

Change is occurring. On October 31, 2000 the United Nations Security Council, under the Namibian presidency, unanimously passed Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, moving the Security Council from a gender blind institution to one that will work for women's involvement at all levels of conflict prevention and peace keeping.

The goals of the United Nations include equality between women and men, the elimination of poverty, the protection of human rights and the preservation of our environment. If you pursue these ideals you are doing useful work, but if your aim is the pursuing of peace and taking apart the tools of war - disarmament - the main mission of the United Nations, then you are sometimes judged as soft in the head working toward a noble but impossible dream. This is testament to how embedded militarism and weapons are, however, wars are not mysterious eruptions of human nature, but are planned for, trained for, created, and we can see them coming from a long way off.

WILPF'S publications, presentations, and seminars on gender and disarmament

Publications:

Presentations:

Seminars:

Since 1984, WILPF has worked with other NGOs to organise a seminar linking 8 March – International Women's Day – with disarmament, peace, and security issues. Each year, a report and statement from the NGO conference has been read into the record of the Conference on Disarmament, the only official oral contribution from NGOs to this body.

The following are various statements and reports produced from these seminars:

Other seminars:

In 2006, Reaching Critical Will and PeaceWomen hosted a dialogue on gender and disarmament at the UN General Assembly First Committe on Disarmament and International Security. Read a summary of the dialogue on Gender and Weapons.

United Nations Department for Disarmament Affairs work on Gender and Disarmament

  • Gender Mainstreaming Action Plan (public version), launched 15 April 2003.
    This document contains excerpts from DDA's internatl action plan to implement a mainstreaming strategy in support of gender equality. The original document was drafted for internal use by DDA. Because of the interest in our process we welcome the opportunity to share our document. Some chapters (notably Chapter 2 outlining the goals of the Action Plan) reflect the strategy adopted by DDA. Other chapters (notably the annexes) are provided as background and food for thought in the ongoing challenge to identiy ways and opportunities to simultaneously work for disarmament and gender equality.
  • Gender Perspectives on Disarmament, published by the Department for Disarmament Affairs in collaboration with the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women of the Department for Economic and Social Affairs.
  • The Work of the Department for Disarmament Affairs in Implementing Security Council Resolution 1325, by Jayantha Dhanapala, Under Secretary-General for the United Nations Inter-agency Panel to Commemorate the First Anniversary of Security Council resolution 1325, New York, 31 October 2001. Organized by the Inter-agency Taskforce on Women, Peace and Security.
  • Gender and Disarmament, Keynote Address by Jayantha Dhanapala, Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs of the United Nations. Women Waging Peace Policy Day 2002, John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University November 8, 2002.

Other resources

"Building a Women's Peace Agenda," Gender Perspectives on Peace and Disarmament: Selected Resources.
For a copy, write to the WILPF INternational Secretariat, inforequest(at)wilpf.ch

Cohn, Carol and Sara Ruddick, "A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction," Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction, eds. Steven Lee and Soheil Hashmi, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Cohn, Carol, Felicity Hill and Sara Ruddick. "The Relevance of Gender for Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction." Disarmament Diplomacy Issue No. 80, Autumn 2005.

Cohn, Carol. "Slick 'Ems, Glick Ems, Christmas Trees and Cookie Cutters: Nuclear language and How we Learned to Pat the Bomb." Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 43 (June 2001).

Conaway, Camille and Anjalina Sen. Beyond Conflict Prevention: How Women Prevent Violence and Build Sustainable Peace, New York: Global Action to Prevent War and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 2005. (also see http://www.globalactionpw.org/Resolution1325/index.htm)

Enloe, Cynthia. The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993.

Scott, Joan, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” Gender and the Politics of History. NY: Columbia, 1988.

Tickner, J. Ann. Gender in International Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Disarmament and gender equality "are global public goods whose benefits are shared by all and monopolized by no one. In the UN system, both are cross-cutting issues, for what office or department of the United Nations does not stand to gain by progress in gender equality or disarmament? When women move forward, and when disarmament moves forward, the world moves forward. Unfortunately, the same applies in reverse: setbacks in these areas impose costs for all."

-Jayantha Dhanapala
Under Secretary-General
Department for Disarmament Affairs
November 8, 2002.

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