War Amongst the People by Whitney Grespin

Author:Whitney Grespin [Whitney Grespin]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Preparing Peacekeepers for Deployment

The shift from traditional peacekeeping missions towards multi-dimensional peacekeeping missions from the late 1990s has resulted in the articulation of two types of peacekeeper – the warrior peacekeeper, who employs conventional military skills, and the cosmopolitan peacekeeper that applies softer, less traditional skills to communicate and negotiate with warring factions and local people, implement community-engagement PoC tasks and support mission-specific peacebuilding efforts.⁷ Yet, as Curran contends, improving peacekeeping training so that these divergent peacekeeper identities can be better reconciled to respond to complex demands in regions where ‘war amongst the people’ occurs remains a challenge.⁸

The UN defines peacekeeping training as ‘any training activity which aims to enhance mandate implementation’ by equipping uniformed personnel with the skills, capabilities and attitudes to ‘meet the evolving challenges of peacekeeping operations, in accordance with DPKO/DFS principles, policies and guidelines, [and] lessons learnt from the field’.⁹ General Assembly resolution A/RES/49/37 (1995) stipulates that TCCs are required to train uniformed personnel using CPTMs produced by UN DPKO/DFS and the Integrated Training Service (ITS). In this respect, the UN conceptualises pre-deployment training as a mechanism through which liberal peace norms, values, beliefs and technical skills are transferred to peacekeepers, rather than as a field of social practice wherein norms are translated and/or negotiated by actors engaged in the training process. In other words, an examination of how military leaders, military trainers, external consultants and individual trainees partake in the pre-deployment training programme is required to understand how norms are implemented in practice.

To date, few studies on peacekeeping training have accounted for the differences in experiences between men and women and the gender dynamics within the teaching environment¹⁰ and the prevailing assumption in much of the existing research is that the soldier-trainee – or peacekeeper subject – is either gender-neutral or male.¹¹ Empirical studies exploring gender and peacekeeping training have tended to analyse gender training modules in isolation. These studies examine how male soldiers are trained and socialised as peacekeepers and fall into two categories: educating men about the purpose of gender mainstreaming and preventing Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA) by enforcing norm compliance through behavioural change.¹² How female military peacekeepers learn soft skills and capabilities during the pre-deployment training programme, beyond combatant capabilities, and how they are trained to perform as peacekeepers has not been the subject of such studies. This is surprising, given that, increasingly, women are regarded as a ‘gender resource’, deployed to deliver specific tasks such as responding to rape survivors, as discussed below.

UNSCR 1325 and its related resolutions propose that gender mainstreaming should be systematically integrated into all systems and structures and across all security institutions operating in peacekeeping and peacebuilding contexts.¹³ UN gender mainstreaming norms¹⁴ purport that ‘biological sex’ and culturally constructed concepts of ‘gender’ should be separated to ensure that individuals, regardless of their sex, sexuality and gender, are empowered, treated fairly and provided equal opportunities within peacekeeping workforces.¹⁵ Although the UN’s gender mainstreaming norms derive from the UN Charter and are relatively stable, they are adaptive and adaptable and can be translated and operationalised in varied ways by different agents.

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