Half the world

The goal of this National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security is as simple as it is profound: to empower half the world’s population as equal partners in preventing conflict and building peace in countries threatened and affected by war, violence, and insecurity.  Achieving this goal is critical to our national and global security.

Those are the opening lines of the  U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security unveiled yesterday at Georgetown University by Secretary of State Clinton.  My friends at Inclusive Security asked me if I would blog on it–I hope they won’t be too disappointed in the results.

The plan is impeccably right-minded:  it makes engagement and protection of women central to U.S. policy, complements existing efforts, establishes inclusion as the norm, emphasizes coordination and declares U.S. agencies accountable for implementing the plan.  Nothing wrong with any of that.

The problem is that women are not often the problem.  Only in rare instances do they join armed groups, chase civilians from their homes, rape and pillage or commit other war crimes.  Men do most of these things, and men generally order these things done.  When the time comes to make peace, the people you need at the negotiating table are the ones who control the ones with the guns.

The people you should want at the negotiating table are the ones without guns:  victims, male or female, who have a stake in ending war and building peace.  But only rarely are they brought in, mainly because the guys with guns don’t want them there.  In my time working on the Bosnian Federation in the 1990s, I can’t recall an occasion on which a woman was in the room during a negotiation as a representative of one of the “formerly warring parties.”  But neither was there ever a man in the room who hadn’t been a belligerent, who just wanted a normal life, who thought the safety and security of his family was more important than ethnic identity.   Constituents for peace are a threat to belligerents, who want all the cards in their own hands, not in someone else’s.

This does not explain why women aren’t used as mediators.  Of the current State Department special envoys and representatives who report directly to Hillary Clinton, only four of twenty-one are women, if I am counting correctly.  Seven of the ten who do not report directly to the Secretary are women.  Certainly these are higher numbers of women than at times in the past, but that 4/21 is not exactly smashing the glass ceiling.  The UN, which naturally reflects not only American values, has never used a woman as a chief mediator, according to the report.

While I would be the last to quarrel with the need to protect women from sexual and gender-based violence during and after conflict, as well as their right to resources during recovery from violence, it is in the conflict prevention section that I think the report says some really interesting things.  Let me quote at some length:

…gender-specific migration patterns or precipitous changes in the status or treatment of women and girls may serve as signals of broader vulnerability to the onset or escalation of conflict or atrocities. This focus will help to ensure that conflict prevention efforts are responsive to sexual and gender-based violence and other forms of violence affecting women and girls, and that our approaches are informed by differences in the experiences of men and women, girls and boys. Further, we will seek to better leverage women’s networks and organizations in activities aimed at arresting armed conflict or preventing spirals of violence.

Finally, the United States understands that successful conflict prevention efforts must rest on key investments in women’s economic empowerment, education, and health. A growing body of evidence shows that empowering women and reducing gender gaps in health, education, labor markets, and other areas is associated with lower poverty, higher economic growth, greater agricultural productivity, better nutrition and education of children, and other outcomes vital to the success of communities.

I’m not sure I am completely comfortable with the notion that women and girls are the canaries in the coal mine, but the notion that women’s employment, health and education, often viewed as the softer side of peacebuilding, are in fact central to the enterprise is one that I think has real validity.  If Afghanistan has any chance at all of coming out all right from the last decade of hellish conflict, it is because of what has been done on health and education, two of the relative success stories in an otherwise bleak picture.  Education is one of the failed sectors in Bosnia, where its segregation has helped to sustain ethnic nationalists in power.  The role of women in North Korea, where they are increasingly responsible for providing livelihoods from small gardens, is likely to be fundamental.

We won’t really know if this “action plan” is effective for another year, or perhaps two or three.  It is probably too much to hope that the forcefulness and clarity of purpose with which it was prepared will blow away the barriers that have stood for so long.  But if it enables America to tap more of its own talent as well as draw on constituencies for peace in conflict-prone countries, it will have served a useful purpose.