Does that sound too simplistic? Excuse me, but the world, particularly the UN, has a rather lousy record in complicating human understanding of what should otherwise be natural occurrences. In 1998, Elisabeth Rehn (former Minister of Defense of Finland) and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Minister of Finance of Liberia, later to become Africa’s first woman president) – just about the only internationally recognized women working in the field of international peace and security at that time – were asked by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan to investigate the sexual violence so visibly present in the wars in Bosnia, Rwanda, the Congo, etc., and report through the UN to the Security Council on proposed countermeasures.
Recognizing that violence against women was not the cause but a criminal manifestation of an ongoing conflict, they insisted that for anything they could suggest to be effective, gender equality had to be achieved in all areas of politics, business, society, and culture. So their reports had one overarching suggestion: in all groups or committees dealing with issues of international peace and security, it would be better, when working on legitimate and realistic solutions, to have women at the table and not outside the door.
Furthermore, they noted that the more peace negotiations involved women, the more successful their outcomes, partly because women are mothers. This last remark, well-meant as it was and endorsed by the male-dominated Security Council then and now, also captures the main image problem one faces in trying (not easy) to get (primarily male) institutional and individual decision-makers to see the simplest and usually most logical approach towards achieving gender equality.
Parse UN documents dealing with issues of international peace and security, and you cannot help but be struck by the gender blindness of these materials. Overwhelmingly and routinely, they refer to men when describing combatants, aggressive builders of empires, and wagers of war. They refer to men, women, and children only when looking at casualties, and often again men, slightly less so women, and children when examining civilian casualties.
This is a bad thing in itself, but it is particularly problematic because it impedes the further engagement of those men doing the fighting. The few references to women doing that fighting are usually ill-informed and often label those activities as “specific to women.” Armed conflict has been so thoroughly gendered that we categorically and uncritically look at “men” and “women” (although much less so “children,” as they are “victims”) when approximating a gender perspective on conflict and the subsequent attempts, or as is often the case, lack thereof, to establish the conditions that will allow women to live in peace and security.
But at the conflict micro or remote management levels, we are content in recognizing from recent experience that both women and men are called into action only to do the fighting and dying, while either gender finds that it is still women who are the “collateral victims” – gender-blind language at its most lethal and shaming,