Women, Peace and Security
Expected Council Action
In August, the Security Council will hold a briefing on “Sustaining Women, Peace and Security Commitments in the context of accelerated drawdown of peace operations”. Assistant Secretary-General for Africa in the Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee, UN Women Executive Director Sima Sami Bahous, and a civil society representative are the anticipated briefers.
It appears that Sierra Leone intends to draw the Council’s attention to challenges for the implementation of the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda and gender equality during and in the aftermath of drawdowns, reconfigurations, and accelerated terminations of UN peacekeeping operations and special political missions.
Background and Key Recent Developments
UN peace operations transitions have emerged as a key focus of Security Council attention in the context of the termination of the mandates of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali in June 2023 and the UN Integrated Transition Mission in Sudan in December 2023, as well as the drawdown of the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) from the end of 2023. Looking ahead, in May, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) was renewed for a final 19-month period until December 2025, after which the mission will cease its operations. Also in May, Somalia sent two letters to Council members; the first calling for the “swift conclusion of the necessary procedures for the termination of the [m]ission by the end of the mandate in October”. The second letter expressed Somalia’s readiness to engage with relevant stakeholders in the “preparation of [a] complex transition process within [the] appropriate timeframe”.
Strained relations between host countries and missions, as well as divisions among Security Council members, which are then exploited by host country leaders, have made recent transitions particularly challenging. In these circumstances, host governments may compel UN missions to withdraw in haste, possibly undermining gains made during their presence and with potentially dangerous consequences for civilians if the security vacuum left by the mission is not adequately filled. (For background, see our UN Transitions in a Fractured Multilateral Environment research report.)
Additional risks and challenges for the WPS agenda in these contexts include a decline in attention to, and monitoring of, women’s participation in peace and political processes; women’s rights; sexual and gender-based violence, including conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV); and attacks on women human rights defenders and peacebuilders.
The Council has held several thematic discussions on UN peace operation transitions in general, most recently in an open debate organised by former Council member Ireland in September 2021. Members have also begun to address the effects of such processes on specific capacities of UN peace operations. For instance, the Council’s latest annual open debate on children and armed conflict, held on 26 June, spotlighted the need to preserve and transfer child protection data and capacities during the transition of UN peace operations.
August’s briefing will mark the first time that the Security Council focuses specifically on challenges of accelerated drawdowns for the WPS agenda. Some of these concerns have been touched upon in recent meetings of the Informal Experts Group (IEG) on WPS, such as the 6 November 2023 meeting on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the 26 January meeting on Sudan, and the 8 April meeting on Iraq.
Adopted following the September 2021 open debate, resolution 2594 was the first thematic Security Council resolution on transitions. It recognised that mission reconfiguration may entail increased risks for civilians, including women, and emphasised the need for peace operations to engage “at the earliest possible stage in integrated planning and coordination on transitions” with the UN presence on the ground, the host state and other national stakeholders including civil society.
Resolution 2594 requested the Secretary-General to make sure that a comprehensive gender analysis; technical gender expertise; and the full, equal, and meaningful participation of women are included throughout the transition process, as well as to ensure the inclusion of youth and “measures to safeguard the interests of persons with disabilities”. It further requested the Secretary-General to make sure that “their needs are fully integrated in all prioritised and sequenced stages of a mission mandate and mission transitions”. (This language was likely based on resolution 2242 on WPS. Adopted in 2015, resolution 2242 had already urged the UN to make sure that gender analysis and technical gender expertise were included in mission drawdowns, and that women’s needs and participation were integrated in all sequenced stages of mission mandates.)
The June 2022 Secretary-General’s report on transitions in UN peace operations included examples of UN approaches to gender-responsive conflict analysis and integration of gender equality into transition processes. It noted the need for additional planning, monitoring and evaluation capacities, including on human rights and gender mainstreaming, as part of integrated transition teams in missions.
In his latest report on CRSV, issued in April 2024, the Secretary-General noted that with the accelerated drawdown of peace operations in Mali and Sudan, the UN “encountered significant challenges” in sustaining the implementation of Security Council resolutions on CRSV. The report called for the timely deployment of women’s protection advisers, noting, however, that the level of human and budgetary resources allocated to their deployment “is far from commensurate with the scale of the challenge”. More broadly, the 2023 Secretary-General’s annual report on WPS recommended that UN member states ensure that predictable resources are made available for gender equality and WPS programming and expertise during drawdowns and transitions.
Women civil society representatives have highlighted these and other issues in their briefings at the Security Council. In her briefing at the 11 December 2023 meeting on the DRC, National Coordinator of the NGO Solidarité Féminine pour la Paix Sandrine Lusamba addressed MONUSCO’s drawdown. She recommended that MONUSCO and the UN Country Team work with local and national NGOs to develop indicators to evaluate the security situation in the country, measuring “the protection and promotion of women’s human rights, including in the areas of gender-based violence, attacks on women human rights defenders, sexual and reproductive rights and the meaningful participation of women”. Lusamba also recommended that donors support the DRC government “so that it can fulfil its protection responsibilities”. She further called for funding the UN humanitarian response plan for the DRC, and women-led and women’s rights organisations.
Key Issues and Options
The pivotal issue for the Security Council remains the full implementation of the WPS agenda and its impact on the ground. A key issue for Council members supportive of the agenda is to preserve and strengthen WPS language in thematic and country-specific outcomes and to follow up on the implementation of these decisions.
Regarding the topic of the briefing, an option for Council members is to politically and materially support comprehensive, context-specific, coordinated, and gender-responsive strategies for transition processes and the post-drawdown period by both the UN and host states. At August’s briefing and in relevant Council decisions, members could call for the meaningful participation of feminist and women’s rights organisations as well as women human rights defenders in determining such strategies, and follow up on the effective inclusion of such advice.
Members could also call for and adequately fund mechanisms for the continuity, preservation, and transfer of knowledge and capacity on monitoring the implementation of the WPS agenda across all its pillars (participation, protection, prevention, and relief and recovery) including, for instance, monitoring sexual and gender-based violence and attacks on women human rights defenders and peacebuilders. Members can further provide enhanced support to the deployment of gender advisers and women protection advisers in peace operations, including those undergoing transitions.
As the organiser of this briefing, Sierra Leone could prepare a chair’s summary of the meeting to capture salient themes of the discussion to be circulated in a Council letter.
Council Dynamics
Most Council members are generally supportive of the WPS agenda. However, the prevalent assessment, including among several Council members and civil society actors, is that the dynamics on this file remain difficult and unconducive to the adoption of new WPS outcomes, these difficulties being further complicated by the Council’s polarisation in the context of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Supportive members and civil society organisations emphasise instead the need to close the persisting gap in the implementation of the framework set out in the Council’s WPS resolutions and the numerous domestic and regional initiatives it generated. Feminist civil society organisations—such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—have criticised Security Council members who express rhetorical support for the WPS agenda, human rights and the rule of law, while “simultaneously contributing to violence and insecurity around the globe”.
Council members retained WPS-related language in several resolutions and were, at times, able to strengthen it. For instance, in June the Council adopted resolution 2736 which, among other things, demands that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) halt the siege of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state in Sudan. For the first time since the outbreak of the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF in April 2023, this resolution encouraged engagement by UN and regional actors to advance peace and an inclusive Sudanese-led political process with the “full, equal, meaningful and safe participation of women”.
At the same time, Russia and China often challenge the inclusion of language on WPS in Security Council products. Russia has regularly argued that the Council’s engagement on WPS should be limited to the consideration of “women’s issues in a context of the maintenance of peace and security and in connection to situations that are on the Council’s agenda”, since human rights and the role of women are already discussed in other UN forums such as the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly.
Russia has advanced a similar argument regarding the human rights and gender aspects of transitions and peacekeeping, saying that “providing States with long-term assistance in the areas of development and human rights through peacekeeping organizations is not appropriate”, and calling for reducing “peacekeepers’ secondary and non-core tasks, especially those on the human rights, social and gender fronts”. During the negotiations of UNAMI’s final mandate renewal Russia opposed the inclusion of WPS language.
Council members Ecuador, France, Guyana, Japan, Malta, the Republic of Korea (ROK), Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Switzerland, the UK, and the US have given continuity to the Shared Commitments on WPS initiative, which was started in 2021 by Ireland, Kenya, and Mexico. It seems that these members held regular strategy meetings and tried to coordinate their positions on key WPS issues. They have also held seven WPS-focused press stakeouts this year in connection with Council meetings, including on Sudan, the Great Lakes and Afghanistan.
Engagement on some commitments remained uneven, however. Only Malta and the ROK have used their Security Council presidencies in 2024 to focus a mandated country-specific meeting on WPS, respectively on the Great Lakes and Sudan. In April, Malta also focused the annual open debate on CRSV on demilitarisation and gender-responsive arms control, seemingly the first time that this annual open debate addressed this issue.
It also appears that commitment holders have yet to develop coordinated strategies to implement their pledge to draw attention to, and follow up on, “the recommendations and priority issues raised by civil society briefers in Council meetings”.
The UK is the penholder on WPS, and the US is the penholder on CRSV. Sierra Leone and Switzerland are the co-chairs of the IEG on WPS.
| Secretary-General’s Reports | |
| 4 April 2024S/2024/292 | This was the Secretary-General’s annual report on conflict-related sexual violence. |
| 28 September 2023S/2023/725 | This was the Secretary-General’s annual report on women, peace and security. |
