Seriously! by Enloe Cynthia;

Author:Enloe, Cynthia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

CHAPTER SEVEN

Failing to Secure the Peace

Patriarchal Assumptions and Their Consequences for UN Operations in Haiti

A Conversation with Nadine Puechguirbal

This public conversation took place on October 26, 2004, during the U.S. war in Iraq and a major UN peacekeeping and humanitarian aid operation in Haiti. The event was organized and hosted by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, directed by Carol Cohn. Today, the Consortium is located at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Carol Cohn herself is a widely published feminist scholar in the field of gender and international politics. The venue for the 2004 conversation was the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University on the outskirts of Boston. Most of the members of the audience that evening were midcareer women enrolled in graduate programs in preparation for work in international organizations. They had been lobbying the university to infuse the graduate program with more gender analysis.

Nadine Puechguirbal, a French feminist with a PhD in political science from the Sorbonne, has had exceptionally rich hands-on experience in conflict and postconflict societies, working with both the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. She has served as a gender advisor and a gender analyst in Chad, Congo, Somalia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia. When this conversation initially took place, she was serving as Senior Gender Adviser for the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti.

Among Nadine’s publications are “Peacekeeping, Peacebuilding and Post-conflict Reconstruction,” a chapter in Gender Matters in Global Politics, edited by Laura Shepherd, and “Discourses on Gender, Patriarchy and Resolution 1325,” in the journal International Peacekeeping (2010).

In 2012, at the time when Nadine wrote the epilogue that appears at the end of this chapter, she was serving at the UN’s New York headquarters as Senior Gender Adviser in the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations. None of the opinions she expresses here are official positions of that department.

NADINE PUECHGUIRBAL: First of all, before we start, I would like to say that it’s a privilege for me to participate in such an event together with Cynthia Enloe, because her work has really influenced my own work in the field. So, thank you.

What I am going to be talking about is what happens when we don’t integrate gender in peacekeeping. Or what happens when we integrate it wrongly, or when we think we’ve integrated it—like a lot of people in my mission think they’re gender sensitive—but we really haven’t. I’m going to just use a few concrete examples, and then we’ll see at the end if we have more time for questions.

I would like to start by talking about the situation in Haiti. We had a hurricane a few months ago, and one city, the city of Gonaïves, was really badly damaged following the flooding. So the UN community, the international community—everybody—was mobilized to go to Gonaïves and organize the humanitarian assistance. I found it really interesting to realize how gender insensitive the humanitarian community was. You know, I used to work for the Red Cross ten years ago before going to work for the UN.

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