Push a little bit harder

Interview with Clare Hutchinson, NATO Secretary General's Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security

On 9 May 2018 Clare Hutchinson, the NATO Secretary General's Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security, addressed the Forum for Security Co-operation, the OSCE’s decision-making body for military security. She answers questions about why women need to play an equal role in peace processes and the security sector.

Very few people really understand the link between gender equality and sustaining peace. What does gender have to do with security?

What is often misunderstood is that there is a definite and proven link between gender equality and sustainable peace. We know from research that when women are empowered, countries are more secure. It’s not just about women being in areas of health, welfare and education. It is about women being in the areas of peace and security.

If you consider that over 50 per cent of any population in any country are women, then it’s clear that when you have a security dialogue that doesn’t include women, or a gender perspective – remember that not all women have a gender perspective – , when you don’t bring in the issue of women and gender and the perspective of women and men equally into discussions or decisions related to the peace and security of a nation, you’re not going to have sustainable peace.

We see this in many countries of conflict where women are not included in the peace dialogue after the conflict ends. We know gender inequality is one of the drivers of conflict, and if it’s not addressed, it’s going to remain an issue in the future.

In what capacity do you need to include women in peace dialogue – who should be invited?

Peace dialogue should reflect the diversity and intersectionality of society. Women make up over 50 per cent of the population, but they come from different generations, different socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicities and religions – we need to bring them all to the table together to understand what they’re thinking. Often we still seem to think security is a man’s domain. We still think defence is about men and we don’t think women should be included. But they have to be. And that means women from across all sectors.

One of the struggles we have is in understanding that peace and security looks different to women and men. Women – and this is true for all women, collectively – tend to see security in a way that is more inclusive. For men, security is often militarization, or economy or fiscal policies.  Women think of issues like climate change, education or jobs – often it may be jobs for husbands, but jobs nevertheless.

Women are often the victims of conflict situations and wars in a different way from men. What does that mean for the process of building peace?

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security was originally brought into being because it looked at the disproportionate impact of conflict on women and men. That disproportionate impact has to be taken into consideration in how we engage in peace. Because if you’re not addressing what happened to women in a conflict – for example, the higher number of women and girls in conflict subjected to sexual violence – and putting that at the centre of a peace dialogue, then you’re going to have those scars and wounds festering and carrying through to the next generations, leading to more conflict. We see this all the time, and we talk about healing the scars of war, but often the violence to women has not been seen as part of the reconstruction effort or the peace dialogue.

This has been an ongoing struggle.  During the terrible trauma of the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s, sexual violence was still seen as a normal booty of war. Now we’re finally moving to saying the destruction of women’s bodies is no long going to be accepted. With the adoption of UNSCR 1820 in 2008 there was a firm recognition by the international community that conflict-related sexual violence is a tactic of war, and as a tactic needs to be met head-on with political solutions.  However, we are still seeing sexual violence in conflicts around the world. We have the normative framework, but we need to reinforce our commitments.  We need to pay more attention to the Security Council Resolutions to make sure we truly understand the gender dynamics of conflict; we need to invest more resources and act on them.

Would you say there has been progress in overcoming the marginalization of women in peacebuilding?

The fact that we even talk about it now is progress. The meeting we had today [in the OSCE Forum for Security Co-operation] about getting the gender perspective into security dialogue would never have happened ten years ago. I really welcome these kinds of conversations that change how we think about security, because once we start talking about the hard issues, we’ll see real change. And we’re getting there. We have more traction; we have more women in peace negotiations now; we have more women in politics around the world; we have more women leading the corporate sector. It just takes time. And that’s the problem.

I think we’re resting too easy if we just speak the right words. We often say: we’re doing well, we’re looking at increasing the number of women, and then that’s it. We’re not pushing past that first line; we’re not pushing past saying into doing.  

Part of that is not knowing how. Words like “gender integration”, “gender mainstreaming” – what do they mean? We need better training and experts who articulate the how-to, get the message across to difference audiences in their own language. It’s not fair to hold people accountable if they don’t know what they’re being held accountable for.

I think having relationships among all the international organizations, where collectively we can identify or have clarity about these things, is very important. If we can have consensus across the UN, the EU, the OSCE and ourselves, NATO, on what gender means for security, the nations will have clarity – because collectively, we have the same nations for the most part.  I really feel the urgency of getting the mechanisms, the tools and the language in place so that they’re consistent, so that there’s no way to opt out because one doesn’t know.

What is NATO as a military alliance doing to advance the Women, Peace and Security agenda?

For me it has been very interesting coming to NATO after working for many years with the United Nations. The UN is perhaps seen to be more advanced because they have been working on gender longer, but there is a wonderful openness in NATO to the issue of women and security – we have a Secretary General who couldn’t be more committed to the issue and a Deputy Secretary General who is also an incredible supporter.  In NATO, as a consensus-based intergovernmental organization, there is the need to engage and have dialogue on the different issues of gender equality – I think it’s good because it allows you to get insight into how different nations think.

On the operational side, we now have a systematic and consistent deployment of gender advisors at the highest level of command. This is what UNSCR 1325 asked for and we are responding in full to that. On the political side we are working on a new policy and action plan with a holistic framework including all the UN Security Council Resolutions – including on  sexual violence and how we respond.

Putting together the action plan is really all about targeted indicators – they are the heart and soul of any action plan.  You can come up with the activities, but how do you measure them? You can only do better by measuring. We’re not taking this lightly; I want to take time with getting this right. We’re actually doing a workshop in June, bringing together some of the brightest and best minds on indicator development, where we’ve invited the OSCE and others to join us.  

At the OSCE approximately one third of our senior executive managers and one third of the participating States’ permanent representatives are women, but all the military attaches and representatives in the delegations are still men. How does that compare with the situation in NATO?  

I see a similar situation reflected across all organizations, and it is reflective of the whole of society. It will change, but the problem is that to get women up to that level of the military, they have to have been in the armed forces for long enough to rise up through the ranks. And so it takes time. We have to keep breaking it down and calling it out. That has to happen on a consistent basis of just keeping up the pressure. Even one or two women will bring change. I think all international organizations are pretty reflective of each other. Security is the last domain where we have to break this down.

That’s why every woman who works in the area of security needs to have a voice and needs to put that voice out there and say “this is important”. Because this is how change happens. It doesn’t happen overnight, it doesn’t happen easily, but it does happen.

In the end, this is about humanity; it’s about peace; it’s about what we all ultimately should be striving for.  Let’s not tiptoe around the issues; let’s call it out when we see it. We have to be more progressive, we have to be bolder. If we don’t push a little harder, we’re not going to achieve the equality that we so need in our societies.