On 5 June, WILPF co-hosted a roundtable on “Countering Militarised Masculinities and Mobilising Men for Peace and Gender Equality” with the Canadian Ambassador Leslie E. Norton, the Permanent Representative to the United Nations (UN) in Geneva and Ambassador Shara Duncan-Villalobos from the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Costa Rica to the UN.
The roundtable showcased WILPF’s critical work on engaging men and boys for peace and gender equality. Specifically, the meeting created a space for WILPF to share findings from the research carried out by WILPF’s Mobilising Men for Feminist Peace (MMFP) initiative and to discuss the use of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Resolution 35/10.
The importance of UNHRC Resolution 35/10
In June 2017, in its 35th session, the UN Human Rights Council adopted Resolution 35/10 on “Accelerating efforts to eliminate violence against women and girls: engaging men and boys in preventing and responding to violence against all women and girls”. This resolution was sponsored by Canada and co-sponsored by 85 other UN Member States.
This resolution is at the heart of what WILPF’s Mobilising Men for Feminist Peace (MMFP) initiative is working on to engage men in feminist peace and gender equality.
“The resolution is important because it talks about education, gender equality, mentoring, all the things we know are really important to try to change the way we approach the systemic nature of discriminations,” said Madeleine Rees, the Secretary-General of WILPF.
Madeleine added that to move forward, we must ask the right question which is how we change structures that uses and abuses binary notions of gender to a whole system of oppression and how can we do that through the mechanism of the Human Rights Council.
Dean Peacock, Director of the MMFP initiative noted that the MMFP initiative was active in 16 countries. In the six focus countries of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Yemen, the team has been able to carry out critical research that aligns with the goals of Resolution 35/10.
“Throughout the negotiations period at the Human Rights Council, there was great support for the resolution, but also, a lot of back and forth and a lot of dissent. And some of that dissent prefigured in some ways the pushback on gender equality we are experiencing today. In one of the negotiations, delegates from a country now centrally involved in decrying gender as a destructive concept which I won’t name here asked disparagingly‘what is it that you’re trying to achieve here with this resolution? Is it that you want boys to play with dolls and girls to play with trucks?’ And the representative to whom that question was put said, ‘yes, we want people to have the freedom to do precisely that’. Even in that room, there were these intense contestations around gender and what it means for international relations,” said Peacock as he reflected on the discussions at the 2017 Council meeting where 35-10 was approved.
Peacock added that those discussions are still relevant today. He noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked gender as a rationale for his illegal invasion of Ukraine saying ‘Western countries are attempting to impose a dictatorship in which we’re going to be calling mothers and fathers as parent one and parent two, and children are going to be able to have sex changes’. In this environment, he said, gender as a construct and gender as a political force is intensely contested and the basis for ideological and actual conflict.
With this geopolitical context in mind, he turned to the research conducted by WILPF in Afghanistan, Cameroon, Colombia, the DRC and globally to share the findings and their relevance for our current polarised context. The research, he said, tried to understand the forces contributing to men’s involvement in conflict and attempted to go beyond a narrow and reductive focus on gender norms to see how these norms interact with structural and systemic forces operative in each country. “Norms emerge as very salient, as very important. Many men and women reported understanding manhood as synonymous with aggression, dominance, a refusal to negotiate and a refusal to back down, all the stereotypes, in other words. We also learned that many men also derive a sense of power from access to weapons and guns, and we heard that in all the countries,” said Peacock.
In addition to the impact of gender norms, Peacock pointed out that that our research and that conducted by many others indicates that there are other factors which are also powerful predictors of men’s involvement in armed conflict. These include experiencing repression at the hands of the state, military or the police; unequal access to resources; corruption by government officials; and limited opportunities for complaint, protest or redress. This was documented in the research on Cameroon where men and women were pushed off their land due to land-grabbing by the government or multinational companies and the repression they faced led to more gendered radicalisation. It has also been documented by Chatham House in the Sahel, and in many other conflict settings. This means, he said, that our interventions with men must address restrictive and inequitable norms of manhood, but they must also address some of the underlying structural and political conditions that interact with gender norms to shape men’s choices and constrain their options related to conflict and violence.
An understanding of these structural drivers of men’s involvement in conflict, he said, requires us to think about strategies that decrease political repression, including by denying military aid to corrupt autocrats, implementing trade and aid policies that strengthen economic opportunities, including debt relief and loosening requirements related to fiscal austerity, and strengthening state systems of redress and popular confidence in them.
“35/10 marks an important step in global efforts to engage men and boys for gender equality, and against GBV, since it is the first resolution calling upon Member States to engage men and boys in addressing and preventing violence against women and girls.”
From WILPF’s paper on “Use and impacts of UN HRC Resolution 35/10”
Intersections between masculinities and rights
Estelle Wagner, Senior International Advocacy Adviser at the International Planned Parenthood Federation, commented that, “it is important to note that when we think about sexual and reproductive health and rights, we mean it for all people: not only for women, but also for men. We must also understand that gender equality is not a “women’s issue,” it is about systems and structures of power. And I think that’s what’s scary about it for some people: that when you’re questioning systems of power, it threatens the people who hold power in that system. I think a lot of times it’s not even ultimately about gender: it’s about how to hold on to systems of power and oppression in society, and that is manifested on the bodies of the most vulnerable in those societies and the most marginalized in those societies, LGBT people and women and girls.”
Equally important, Iceland has been working on Resolution 1325 and has developed the barbershop toolkit to mobilise and motivate men in political office to address discriminatory stereotypes of masculinity and made it available to the UN as an important resource. In their advocacy efforts, Iceland focuses on prevention work as much as mainstreaming the WPS agenda into conflict and post-conflict contexts
Commenting on Resolution 1325, a delegate who follows the Arms Trade Treaty and several other disarmament mechanisms and initiatives in Geneva added that we must consider how they relate to this work.
“I think one of the things that we have been doing in this space with partners in the global south and other regional groups are joint statements. It’s not binding language, but it’s an important way of advancing our thinking and getting some transformative language on the table. Last year, we issued a statement that acknowledged the importance of data disaggregation that includes SOGI, I think it’s sometimes those moments where you do get breakthroughs in different communities of practice where perhaps it’s new language in the arms trade and the disarmament sphere,” the delegate said.
One of the issues that the MMFP initiative explores is conscientious objection which in the context of conflict, it refers to mostly men who refuse to obey orders and get mobilised to fight in the army. During the meeting, a diplomat shared a personal story on conscientious objection and concluded that the history of wars in Europe and the stories that were passed down by the elders made the younger population empowered to articulate positions against fighting in wars because they have heard about the horrors of war.
More collaboration and networking
The roundtable which was well-attended by members of the Geneva diplomatic and humanitarian community inspired great conversations on the importance of engaging men and boys in a heavily militarised world and the importance of working together and increasing the synergy between the MMFP initiative and critical efforts and advocacy around sexual and reproductive health and rights as well as the discussions on the arms trade and the international backlash on women’s rights.
To conclude the event, Peacock said that engaging with men and boys pays off and we saw results in Afghanistan in WILPF’s section there.
“Prior to the Taliban takeover, we had 10,000 members in WILPF Afghanistan. 3,000 or a full third of the WILP members in Afghanistan were men who were choosing to associate with an organisation called the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and I say that story because I think this is reason for tremendous optimism,” said Peacock.
To read WILPF’s original research on the “Use and impacts of UN HRC Resolution 35/10”, click here and to explore the MMFP’s larger body of research, click here.
