Yesterday, the United Nations Security Council met to vote on a new resolution on wartime sexual violence (under the more general rubric of ‘women, peace and security’). Resolution 2106, as it now is, was passed unanimously, and so joins those other numerical signifiers in the chain of gender mainstreaming: 1325, 1820, 1888 and 1960. The session had been convened by William Hague (the UK holds the Security Council chair for June), and the presence of Angelina Jolie (or ‘Angelina Jolly’, as more than one state representative called her) brought obvious publicity advantages, although that in itself is not so surprising both given her close work with Hague on the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative and her role as Special Envoy for the UN High Commission for Refugees.

UNSCR 2106 seems designed mainly as a political symbol that the Council “remains actively seized” of the importance of conflict-related sexual violence, and essentially extends a number of themes already in play (there’s a whole bunch of urges, calls for, recognizes, requests in the text). It seeks the expanded use of targeted sanctions against perpetrators and commanders involved in sexual violence and reiterates the connection of that thing called ‘gender’ to DDR, security sector and justice reforms. It repeats the ‘zero tolerance policy’ on sexual violence and abuse by UN forces, requests further reports on progress to the Council, and so on. There were some other points of note, partly in the mention of men and boys as victims, and partly in some puzzling recessive points such as the Resolution’s demand (its word) that women and children abducted into armed forces be released (given that they are especially vulnerable), with no concomitant mention of kidnapped men.

The resolution also called for sexual and gender-based violence training for all pre-deployment and ‘in-mission’ peacekeeper training, and it is here that perhaps the biggest substantive contribution lies. Numerous references were made in the debate to an expanded role for Women Protection Advisers. Like the discussion of targeted sanctions (mentioned first in UNSCR 1820) this is not brand new, since Women Protection Advisers were themselves an innovation of 1888, which upgraded them from existing gender and human rights advisers. The exact nature of the new role is as yet unclear, but it seems to involve an expansion of their mandate to apply to all UN deployments, since they are currently active in just eight peacekeeping missions (which is just over half).

A few other quick observations on the text and the debate.  Continue reading →