Women, Peace and No Security: How Climate Change could be a Solution

The UN's Security Council held open debates recently on the issue of Women, Peace and Security, inviting members and member states, as well as special representatives to address current issues, challenges and continued gaps. Above all, it highlighted the continued hypocrisy of nations, committing to equality and peace while trafficking in capitalism and an arms trade that is destroying lives and driving migration at unprecedented levels. Despite overwhelming data on the value added of women and gender equality to the social development, economic prosperity and sustainability of peace within and between nations, women continue to be excluded from even the most basic levels of decision-making power. Can there be a change? Can we use another global catastrophe to motivate it?

The situation remains dire. The groundbreaking resolution in 2000 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS), Resolution 1325, was followed by a litany of additional resolutions known colloquially under the helm of 'the WPS umbrella.' These Resolutions seek to rectify the understanding that conflict differently and disproportionately affects women and that global  statutes and norms on conflict resolutions continued to exclude women's particular needs or representation in centers of decision-making power. 

The Resolutions equally recognized the perverse and rampant use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and provided that international alliances, both military and political, must put in place measures of prevention, protection and response against sexual violence and that peace processes must include measures of access to justice and end impunity for perpetrators. The Resolutions have known global recognition and support, and spawned the creation of accountability mechanisms in the shape of National Action Plans for implementation into government processes and actions, special representatives that collect, analyze and report on data and progress, and countless forums and high-level working groups that work closely with governments, military and civil society to bring the Resolutions to life in all cycles of conflict prevention, resolution and peace building. 

"We know, so we now need to act."

-Representative from The Netherlands

It remains an enormous and daunting task. Women are not the ones who are starting conflicts - in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, Sudan, Columbia - and yet they bear the brunt of violence on their bodies, their families and livelihoods, they bear the burden of displacement, the loss of resources and opportunities, and are continuously excluded from peace processes. All this despite the widespread evidence that including women in peace processes results in a 35% increased chance of peace lasting at least 15 years. As was made clear from the contributions from Sweden, the Netherlands and the Head of UNWomen, enough with the justifications. Women must move beyond justifying their presence in traditionally male dominated domains, especially when men continue to fail at peace negotiations and sustainable nation-building. Women belong at the peace negotiations because it is their right.

"No one needs to be given a voice, we all have a voice, what we need is more listening."

-Margot Wallstrom, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden

The data on women's inclusion in peace processes is especially dismal in an era of unprecedented conflict and number of internally displaced persons and refugees. Of the more than 1500 peace agreements that have come to pass since the year 2000, only 25% specifically recognize women's participation and contributions. Women make up only approximately 2% of mediators and 8% of negotiators and continue to be relegated to observer status or advisory bodies within peace processes, with no representation or influence over actual decision-making. 

Gender inequality and dis-empowerment of women continues to be both a cause and effect of conflict, even as research shows that countries with the highest indexes of gender equality also have the most cohesive and peaceful societies. Donor funding remains low, with only 5% of global funds going specifically to women's participation within peace processes. Women constitute only about 4% of peacekeepers and 10% of police units in conflict or post-crisis areas where gender justice is crucial to tackle prevention and response to sexual and gender-based violence. National investment in mainstreaming gender in  own military and security forces would mean countries could contribute more gender equal forces to peacekeeping operations Meanwhile, despite the minuscule numbers hiding behind the great big public commitments governments make on women, peace and security, the era of a new arms race is well underway. At 1.57 trillion dollars for military spending, the spread and easy access to arms and military equipment continues to fuel never-ending conflict that destroys communities, shatters societies and spreads like wildfire across borders. The era of hypocrisy continues, unabated.

 "We want three things: bigger boats, stronger nets and not to get raped."

-Women in the Sahel.

The physical effects of conflict on women are profound. Without getting into the vast existing data sets, a few numbers stand out: "child marriage" has seen an incredible rise in Yemen since the start of the conflict, from 32% in 2015 to 62% in 2017. Maternal mortality rates in conflict are twice the global norm. Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRD) continue to be targeted in conflict and peacebuilding and represent another group in need of particular protection.

"A Unicef official told me that the rate of child marriage for girls has almost tripled since 2015 and that it is now estimated to be about 65 percent. Parents “need to get rid of girls because they cannot feed them,” he told me. These girls will be pulled out of school — if they were lucky enough to attend in the first place — and many will be raped and forced to bear children before their bodies are ready, perpetuating a cycle of illiteracy and broken health."
How the War in Yemen became a Bloody Stalemate - and the Worst Humanitarian Crisis in the World,  The New York Times, Oct 31, 2018.

Yet it is the scourge of conflict-related sexual violence that so blankets every conflict and remains most perverse.  Both an indicator of conflict and a precursor to the breakdown in social fabric, from the DRC to Columbia to Afghanistan to Iraq and Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Syria, Sri Lanka, Nepal and beyond, sexual violence continues to be used as a weapon of war, spreading terror and leaving women and communities permanently scarred. Impunity persists, with perpetrators rarely brought to justice, and with the same heads of state and military who order mass rapes also being the ones to sit at the peace negotiation table. 

A recent 2017 Global Report on conflict-related sexual violence describes the following data from Myanmar:

"OHCHR reported in February that more than 50 of the 100 women and girls interviewed described having been subjected to rape, gang rape or other forms of sexual violence, apparently employed systematically to humiliate and terrorize their community. Some of the rapes were carried out in front of relatives, as well as to punish women for their perceived support of 'insurgent' who are often male family members. Only those survivors who managed to cross the border have been able to access care."

Sex trafficking, sexual slavery, "child marriage", forced prostitution, rape, sexual humiliation - men continue to perpetrate these crimes against women and girls who bear conflict on their bodies in visceral and traumatizing ways. 

"We must end superficial efforts that do not lead to influencing outcomes."

Head of UNWomen, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

So what can be done? Many concrete solutions point to, before all else, deep structural inequalities that require radical changes in value propositions and mindset, both in zones of conflict and in the institutions purporting to provide solutions. Who represents leadership? Who is a symbol of power? Who participates and who sits on the sidelines? As much as we understand data and evidence, if the mindsets of those sitting in the chairs of power from New York to Sana'a do not undergo radical transformations, we will continue to perpetuate inequalities and reinforce traditional destructive norms within the most vulnerable of areas. 

The UN, as well as progressive countries such as Canada, Sweden and the UK, must compel the international community, our peacekeeping missions and our support to peace processes to only support those peace processes that occur with women's meaningful participation. In two ways, this serves a clear purpose: meaningful because only having a seat at the table does not ensure being able to influence decision-making, and meaningful participation because we must also selfishly consider that if we do not support women's participation, we risk time, resources and effort in re-negotiating the same peace processes when they inevitably breakdown, given that, as mentioned above, women's meaningful participation contributes to sustainable peace, as does a nation's rating on gender equality overall. 

In such support to peace processes - resolutions, agreements, statements, commitments - these have no meaning without prompt and well-resourced action plans. The Women, Peace and Security sessions at the Security Council continue to be the open debates with the most participation and most member state observations and pledges. Yet when it comes to funding, the gap is a chasm, at best. A minimum of 15% target of spending on WPS across funding sources to contribute to women's participation in peace processes, increase resiliency and provide for protection and prevention of conflict-related sexual violence is necessary for any measures of the 1325 Resolutions to know solid implementation and sustainability. 

Still, I cannot help but be critical and highlight some of the hypocrisies within the 1325 umbrella of resolutions. In many ways, the Resolutions urge us to be proponents of including women within highly patriarchal, sexist and hierarchical structures as a way to promote women's empowerment and gender equality, while these structures, military, peacekeeping and peacebuilding alike, continue to serve a global cycle of the selling of both war and peace that inevitably persists in its enormous toll on the most vulnerable which ends up being predominantly women and girls.

Increasing the number of women within military alliances such as NATO or within UN Peacekeeping Operations or a nation's military does nothing to little to address the way conflict is itself approached and negotiated, and assumes that a key solution to a dispute is military by nature. As much as armed responses can be necessary to protect against the most egregious of crimes under international law, historically they have been rarely used for that purpose. Instead, militaries are more often used to wage unseen, brutal wars in far away places, where there is little oversight on the way in which arms and power are used. These hierarchical structures of patriarchal abuse of power and retribution are not contested simply by slotting women within them. A more fundamental discussion is necessary to understand if the ways in which conflict and war have been fundamental drivers of international "cooperation" is truly serving the people that make up the global alliances, or is it the result of a male-dominated patriarchal power structure that uses violence as a first method of communication; the purest form of what we can call harmful masculinities. 

Furthermore, it seems to me that we can no longer have discussions of equality and empowerment on a global scale without seriously discussing the devastating effects of the arms trade and capitalism as its driving force. I listen to the Ambassador of the UK speak about the necessity to advocate for women within peace negotiations and I cannot help but think of a recent report uncovering that the UK has doubled its sale of arms to countries with extensive human rights abuses, and how it has worked to hide these sales from public knowledge. At least, I think, the current US government does little to mask its true motivations: Saudi Arabia can continue slaughtering Yemenis and shutting down their ports to aid, prolonging the widest cholera epidemic ever recorded and leaving nearly 17 million Yemenis on the brink of famine, as long as it gets its billions in the sale of arms to the Kingdom. Even Canada's Prime Minister recently emerged to say that it would 'consider' freezing the sale of arms to the Saudis, after Germany said it was doing so, but warned that it comes with a billion dollar price tag. Where is the discussion on the price of continuing to have unfettered capitalism as the predominant market economy and the toll it takes on our human capital? If we are to continue along with capitalist fervor, is there a way that does not so naturally involve the death and destruction of war that plays out so predominantly on women's bodies and livelihoods? 

Or is power so immune to to reality?

I would argue that absolutely there is, and it lies in two fundamental sources: a reconstituting of international cooperation, with a value system based on cooperation and global democracy, motivated by a willingness to use climate change as the impetus for changing the global trade system. 

Professor William Nordhaus, who has been working on climate change and the advantages of using pricing to reduce emissions for over four decades, recently shared the Nobel Prize for economics for his work on carbon pricing. In basic terms, his research has shown that raising prices on carbon in the form of a carbon tax is by far a more effective way of countering climate change than government controls. Raising the price on fossil fuels, using a cap and trade system, imposing a carbon tax - these are all ways in which to motivate widespread changes in global trade that would eliminate use and reliance on traditional forms of energy and motivate scale-able industry change. 

The system of a carbon tax is currently used predominantly in the European Union and most predominantly by the Nordic nations, but also by Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan. Canada's provinces have imposed different styles of carbon taxes: Quebec was the first in 2007, followed by Alberta and British Columbia. More recently, the Liberal government passed the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act that will take effect across the nation in 2019, as an output-based carbon tax with steep penalties for non-compliance. 

There is a will, but of course the key players are missing. The United States has not imposed any kind of carbon tax, although there is some momentum, particularly in states such as California. Nor has China, nor India to any effective measure. Without these behemoths, global change will struggle.

The idea, of course, is for the tax to be priced at such an imposing level to not only effectively and efficiently combat climate change but also to motivate a global reconsideration of trade. We need a  common basis for change in global vision and the creation of a new market with unlimited growth that is able to counter the mass production and trade of arms. If capitalism is to remain the way in which we identify future development and success, then let us at least consider a different market source, before the fallout of conflict demolishes us completely. 

And I do mean completely. We are failing magnificently at peace, and we remain hesitant to change the structures that promote war. We inject women into patriarchal structures and peace negotiations in piecemeal fashion, despite their rights, despite the evidence of their value, despite the burden of conflict on their bodies. With the intersection of climate change, conflict is causing record mass migrations across every continent. Coastlines are disappearing, islands are sinking, flooding is wiping out cities and heat waves are increasing the momentum of millions of people inward and across borders. Food prices are skyrocketing as desertification spreads as quickly as the rise in wildfires, hurricanes and tornadoes. New York. Venice. Bangladesh. Brazil. Florida. Australia. Pakistan. South Africa. Germany. No place has been left untouched by the effects of conflict and climate change feeding off each other.

These are no longer horror fantasies, these are the predictions of the latest Global Climate Change Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of over 90 scientists from across the globe. Asked by small island nations to estimate what the effects of global warming by 1.5 degrees would be, as opposed to the 2 degrees of previous predictions, the scientists were shocked by their own findings.  As nations flood each other, shameful politicians attempt to build walls as a first reaction. But this is senseless. Walls cannot stop the ineluctable effects of conflict and climate. It is high time we address both global problems before they become inevitabilities, and perhaps, if expanded upon enough, this could be a momentous driver for a solution.