Originally published on OpenGlobalRights.
By: Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson
To build gender-just sustainable peace, post-war states must make deep changes to address extractivism and inequality.
To build peace that is gender-just and sustainable, we need to start with two questions: What are the conditions of people’s lives at the end of wars, and what do they need to recover? And how can the root causes of war be addressed? Answering them reveals that what usually happens in post-war contexts is essentially the opposite of what’s required!
To build gender-just sustainable peace, post-war states must repair war’s harms, create sustainable livelihoods, invest in both social and physical infrastructure, transform the inequalities that underlie wars, and find ways to forestall the worst of the climate and ecological crises and to restore biodiversity and ecosystems.
Instead of such efforts, which are essentially about rebuilding people’s lives and livelihoods, and the environments on which they depend, we see economic recovery prescriptions designed to rebuild the state’s financial stability and its ability to pay its debt.
The need to service debts not only weighs heavily against the use of financial resources for rebuilding, it also traps states in a series of conditionalities imposed by international financial institutions when states seek foreign assistance, including the demand to increase private inward investment and drastically limit public expenditure. In order to service their debt, many post-war states are, in effect, forced to prioritize the extraction and export of whatever natural resources they might have.
An economy built on the extraction and export of natural resources undermines the prospects for gender-just sustainable peace. From a feminist perspective, peace does not just mean ameliorating war’s impacts on women and other historically marginalized groups; it means transforming the multiple forms of inequality that drive armed conflict in the first place. Extraction-oriented economies work against meeting these goals in at least four ways.
First, gender-just sustainable peace requires at a minimum freedom from physical violence, including sexual violence. There is, however, abundant evidence that pursuing a strategy of natural resource extraction leads to multiple kinds of violences, especially against local women; environmental defenders; and Indigenous, peasant, and other land-based and marginalized communities.
Second, it also needs the restoration of the means of livelihood destroyed by war, as well as the development of new livelihood opportunities. The industrial extraction of natural resources, however, doesn’t deliver on providing jobs, especially not for women and other marginalized groups. Worse still, it typically undermines pre-existing land- and water-based livelihoods (e.g., by poisoning land and water with arsenic, lead, and other toxic metals or usurping the water supply). Moreover, since it also often involves land-grabbing, it displaces many more people, denying them their livelihoods.
Third, this kind of peace requires states that can invest resources in the transformation of inequalities through investing in social services and in physical and social infrastructure. But extractive industries, despite their promises of filling state coffers, actually export the country’s wealth out of the country, yielding little of the revenue benefit the government was supposedly going to receive, thanks to a toxic mix of tax incentives, corruption and corporate criminality, undervaluation of assets, and broken promises.
Finally, gender-just sustainable peace is arguably impossible without a safe and healthy country and planet, but the polluting, ecosystem-destroying nature of extractive industries poisons air and water and drives climate disruption.
We want to emphasize, however, that the problem is not simply extractive industries, but rather extractivism, understood as both a mode of capitalist production and a defining feature of (white Northern) man’s relation to people and the planet. Extractivist capitalism is a system built on centuries of colonial plunder—including the exploitation and extraction of natural resources and labor from the Global South and from racialized communities in the Global North, while dispossessing Indigenous and other local communities of their land and livelihoods.
Based in a worldview that sees both nature and most humans as no more than objects of extraction, it has orchestrated processes that have immiserated populations in large parts of the world through slavery, subjugation, or structural adjustment; as such, it has operated as the central driver of inequalities, insecurities, armed conflict, and ecological collapse.
This distinction between extractive industries and extractivism is consequential. If the problem is understood to solely be extractive industries, their practices and power, it is conceivable to look for solutions in better national and international regulation of the sector. But if the problem is understood to be the underlying assumptions of an entire economic system and its philosophical underpinnings, it becomes clear that a more radical solution is required, an entire paradigm shift in how we approach post-war economic reconstruction.
Post-war economic reconstruction, if it is to meet people’s needs in the aftermath of war and to achieve gender-just sustainable peace, must center an ethic of care for both humans and ecosystems. Feminists recognize that care is at the heart of what we all need to survive and thrive, and see care as necessarily central to how humans should relate to the more-than-human world.
This is the paradigm shift that we need: a shift towards caring for, valuing, and respecting nature, instead of seeing natural resources as something to exploit and extract; a shift towards seeing nature itself as having agency, rather than just as a thing to manipulate and bend to our will; and a shift towards making our economic goals be human and planetary flourishing, instead of ever-expanding GDP and profit-making.
To be clear, then, in briefly considering the ways in which extractivism undermines the prospects for sustainable peace, we are not repeating claims about a “resource curse,” the “lootability” of high-value mineral resources, and the ways that they facilitate corruption. Nor are we laying the vast damages of extractive industries at the doorstep of “weak governance.”
Instead, we are arguing that it is extractivism itself, the logic of extractivist capitalism, that must be foregrounded. For it dominates the questions asked and unasked, as well as the economic options prioritized, at war’s end. And consistently, overwhelmingly, this is destructive to people, to the land and water they depend upon, and to peace itself.
If our goal is to build gender-just peace that is sustainable both politically and environmentally, extractivism must be acknowledged as a moral and practical failure. An approach to peacebuilding, and to political economy itself, rooted in an ethic of care for both humans and ecosystems can no longer be dismissed as idealistic fantasy; it is the only viable way forward.
Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She works across scholarly, policy, and activist communities to create the multidimensional, feminist gendered analyses that are imperative to finding sustainable and just solutions—not only to wars, but to the structural inequalities and environmental crises that underlie them.
Claire Duncanson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. She works with Carol on the Consortium’s “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet” Project, co-authoring works including "Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Postwar States" in Review of International Political Economy (2019) and "Women, Peace and Security in a Changing Climate" in the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2020).
Originally published on the LSE Women, Peace and Security blog.
By: Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson
Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson discuss strategic policy opportunities to boost the UK Government WPS agenda in climate justice and gender equality.
In the 15 years of UK Women, Peace and Security (WPS) policies, programme and National Action Plans, there has been next to no mention of climate change.
How is this possible?
The entire point of the WPS agenda is to ensure that women can live secure lives. And there is no graver threat to women’s security than climate change.
“An atlas of human suffering” is how UN Secretary-General António Guterres described a 2022 IPCC report on the threat of climate change to human wellbeing: “I have seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this”. The report warns that increased heatwaves, droughts and floods are “causing cascading impacts that are increasingly difficult to manage. They have exposed millions of people to acute food and water insecurity, especially in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, on Small Islands and in the Arctic.” About half the global population – between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people – live in areas “highly vulnerable” to climate change. Throughout the globe, the climate crisis poses the gravest threat to the security and wellbeing of women and other marginalised groups. As the IPCC notes, “People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit.”
Women often bear the brunt of climate change: they are the majority of the world’s poor; their role of caring for households, children and the elderly leave them least able to flee; they are more dependent than men on local natural resources for their livelihoods; and unequal gender relations often leave them with few economic or material resources.
Whether in sudden-onset disasters such as floods and typhoons, or slow-onset disasters such as rising sea level, increasing temperatures, land and forest degradation, desertification, and the loss of biodiversity, women are disproportionately affected. When these crises combine with armed conflict, the situation for women becomes exponentially worse.
Other governments, if not the UK, are integrating climate change and WPS in their policies and practice. The UK government has one small fund which makes the links, but both Sweden and Canada bring together the WPS agenda and the climate crisis in their Feminist Foreign Policies. The Scottish Government also recognises the ways that climate change and conflict have mutually reinforcing gendered impacts, and supports women in their efforts to address them. These governments seem to be responding to the UN Secretary-General’s call, in his 2019 Annual Report on the WPS agenda, for “better analysis and concrete, immediate actions to address the linkages between climate change and conflict from a gender perspective.”
Feminist scholars (also see here and here), too, have long been making the case for the WPS Agenda to take the climate crisis more seriously.
It is high time the UK government did so.
In so doing, it not only has an opportunity to make its WPS policy far more realistic, relevant and timely; it also has the opportunity to learn from the history of WPS. It is crucial that it does.
The WPS agenda was an agenda with ambitious aims that could have had truly transformative impacts. Yet it has become a relatively limited programme, focused on a somewhat narrow set of goals: protecting women from the harms of armed conflict, especially conflict-related sexual violence, and supporting the participation of women in peace processes. These are, of course, important aims in and of themselves. Their achievement would improve the lives of many women. But the original motivating goal of the many feminists and women’s organisations who campaigned for a UNSC resolution was much more expansive. Many hoped that bringing a gender lens into the UNSC’s work would foster a more inclusive and transformative approach to peace and security. Some campaigned for the WPS agenda to directly address the root causes of war in the gendered dynamics of militarism and capitalism. In the memorable words of Cora Weiss, one of the drafters of what became UNSCR 1325, the goal was not to make war safe for women, but to eradicate war. This has fallen by the wayside.
The risk, when thinking about women and the climate crisis, or about the ways climate change must be an integral part of the WPS agenda, is that the programme will be similarly limited; a risk that the focus will be only on the ways women suffer disproportionately, or on the need to include more women in climate decision-making. Indeed, most of the current reports that bring WPS, and climate together fall into that trap. They offer multi-country studies establishing that gender inequality, climate vulnerability and state fragility are positively correlated or frame the key problem for women, when climate change and conflict combine, as increased levels of GBV, or provide case studies of women sustaining inclusive peace on the frontlines of climate change
Again, these issues deserve attention, in and of themselves. But they miss the fundamental point, the life-or-death point, the how-to-avoid-descending-more-deeply-into-the-atlas-of-human suffering-point: that our only real hope is to address the root causes of the climate catastrophe we now face. The rest is just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
It is only by confronting what’s driving both the climate crisis and the wars which motivated the WPS agenda – the current extractivist economic model, rooted in centuries of colonial plunder, appropriation of women’s labour, and environmental destruction – that a renewed WPS agenda could offer any real hope.
And offer hope it can. If the UK government decides to raise its ambition – acknowledging not only the centrality of the climate crisis to the WPS agenda, but also the urgent necessity of addressing the crises’ root causes – meaningful, life-altering change can occur. The most profoundly important thing that a renewed WPS agenda can offer is the insight that current “realist” models of how to ensure security and a “thriving” economy have led to world in which almost no one, except perhaps the most hyper-elite among us, can be secure, while planetary well-being is teetering. And feminist alternative visions of the values that should be at the heart of our economies and our relation to the rest of the natural world do, in fact, offer far more realistic pathways to avoid the worst of the crises we face; they can propel us to a world where people, including women and other marginalised groups, are safe and secure, are able to flourish.
In short, the UK’s policy on WPS must confront the economic root causes of both war and the climate crisis and adopt policies that reflect feminist alternative models of economies designed to foster the well-being of all people and the planet itself.
This is perhaps the only thing that really matters at this moment in human history – all the rest is deck chairs.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author(s) only, and do not necessarily reflect LSE's or those or the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security.
About the authors
Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She works across scholarly, policy, and activist communities to create the multidimensional, feminist gendered analyses that are imperative to finding sustainable and just solutions -- not only to wars, but to the structural inequalities and environmental crises that underlie them. Her research and writing has focused on gender and security issues ranging from work on the discourse of civilian nuclear defense intellectuals and U.S. national security elites to gender integration issues in the US military, the concept of “vulnerability” in security and humanitarian discourse, and gender mainstreaming in international peace and security institutions. Currently, much of her energy is devoted to a collaborative international knowledge building project to create a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet,” which she works on jointly with Claire Duncanson.
Claire Duncanson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on issues relating to gender, peace and security, with a particular focus on and gender and peacebuilding. She teaches and supervises in these areas to undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Edinburgh. Her current work aims to bring a feminist analysis to the political economy of building peace. She is the author of Gender and Peacebuilding (Polity Press, 2016), and a range of publications on the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and on gender in militaries. Claire works with Carol Cohn at the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights on the “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet” Project (https://genderandsecurity.org/feminist-roadmap-sustainable-peace ), co-authoring "Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Postwar States" in Review of International Political Economy (2019) and "WPS in a Changing Climate" in the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2020). Claire is an active member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and has co-authored with fellow WILPF member Vanessa Farr on the implementation of the WPS agenda in Afghanistan for Sara Davies and Jacqui True’s Oxford Handbook on the WPS Agenda.
By: Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson
In the Global North, “climate security” has become a dominant frame for thinking—and not thinking—about the climate crisis.
The framing assumes that climate change will disrupt weather and environmental systems, putting pressure on economic and social systems as well as natural resources, leading to large-scale displacement; all of this is expected to create instability, to worsen tensions and create new ones, and to increase the threat of violent conflicts. Though views within this framing rarely claim that climate change is the sole cause of conflict, they often see climate change as ushering in “an era of persistent conflict… a security environment much more ambiguous and unpredictable than that faced during the Cold War.” Climate change is framed as a “threat multiplier,” driving insecurity and violence, particularly across the Global South. While this body of research points to very real and worsening problems, it also pulls attention and resources from addressing the causes of the climate crisis and the necessary solutions.
It is critical to note, however, that the “security” that is of most concern in this framing is threats to the security of powerful states in the Global North, and “security” is taken to mean the ability to defend not only their state borders, but also their political, economic, and military dominance. The privileging of this narrative stems in part from the fact that Global North departments of defense typically have far more power and resources, particularly when it comes to international interventions, than those governing development or the environment. But it goes beyond institutional power and resources. We can only fully explain the privileging of security institutions and framings (especially their influence on the climate crisis) and the grip they have on the popular imagination by paying attention to gender.
Indeed, securitization is a gendered dynamic. It is the process of situating issues in the military sphere, which is itself rendered “serious” and “realistic” by ideas about gender. For generations, the idea that militaries are the most effective means of achieving security has been naturalized by its association with ideas about masculinity: that strength is defined by being able to protect oneself using physical force; that bullies only understand force; that vulnerability invites attack; that security requires impenetrable borders; and so on. This association of manliness with a militarized conception of national identity and national security helps make militaries, military spending, and military solutions seem like the superior, realistic, natural, and obvious routes to achieving security. Conversely, any potential refusal to privilege them is feminized, marking alternative ways of thinking as weak and unrealistic; consider US Ambassador Nikki Haley framing her opposition to discussing a nuclear weapons ban this way: “As a mom, as a daughter, there is nothing I want more for my family than a world with no nuclear weapons. But we have to be realistic.” Ideas about gender naturalize militarized conceptions of security and securitization itself, helping render the “climate security” framework as the most powerful and realistic way of addressing the climate crisis.
Yet there are multiple problems in this gendered “climate security” framing, as well as dangers with the overall securitization of the climate crisis. First, it centers a vision of the world from the perspective of Northern elites, which locates climate change threats as coming from “out there”—from its victims, from outsiders, from people in Global South countries where the violence that threatens “stability” will supposedly occur, and from where displaced people will supposedly be trying to flee—instead of correctly locating the threats to the planet as coming from the Global North countries, militaries, and corporations that are actually the most responsible for it.
Second, it is a framing that leads to a militarized response, which justifies increases in budgets of military and other “security” institutions, capturing the resources we need to solve the climate and wider ecological crises. It further compounds the problem by fostering and legitimating the expansion of military training and operations—thereby increasing their vast use of fossil fuels and other forms of environmental degradation—making the climate and eco-crises worse, not better.
Third, it sets up preservation of the status quo as the goal, whereas dealing with the climate crisis requires massive changes to the status quo. This is especially so if the countries that are least responsible for carbon emissions, and where those most affected live, are ever going to get access to the resources they need to respond.
Fourth, and perhaps the most devastating, is that, if our intention is to head off the worst of climate change and even try to reverse it, framing the climate crisis as a security crisis completely misdirects our attention. The climate crisis is not a crisis of security; it is a crisis of extractivist capitalism, an economic system that incentivizes the exploitation of natural resources as if they were unlimited and “externalizes” the environmental costs of production—from pollution to the release of greenhouse gases. Through its dependence on fossil fuels for cheap energy and industrial agriculture that overexploits soil and water supplies, extractivist capitalism champions growth at all costs, including the destruction of the environment. Its neoliberal insistence on “liberating” markets and denouncing regulation and collective action has made it impossible to take the actions needed to halt climate breakdown.
And it misdirects our attention because the climate crisis is not a crisis of security; it is a crisis of a white western masculinist framing of the relation between humanity and nature. That is, it is a crisis that is a reflection of western, white, male-dominated philosophical and religious traditions, in which man has been seen as separate from and independent of nature, his proper role to dominate “her” and bend her to his will. As Indigenous peoples, environmentalists, and feminists around the world have long argued, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity’s relation to the rest of nature. It fails to recognize that not only do we need to take care of nature, but that nature takes care of us, that we are part of nature, that nature has agency, that humankind is just one species among many on this planet, and that our fundamental relationship to the more-than-human world is one of complex interdependence and reciprocity.
To say that the climate crisis is a crisis of extractivist capitalism, and the western masculinist mindset that underpins it, is not to ignore that the climate crisis will cause tremendous “insecurity” in people’s lives. But that word abstracts, misnames and erases the reality. The climate crisis will cause more people to go hungry; more children to be malnourished, their growth and capacities stunted. More people will drown in floods, typhoons, and hurricanes, or burn to death in wildfires, while others will only have the places they live destroyed. More people will lose their only means of livelihood, as the plants, animals, and ecosystems that have been part of their material survival and cultural identity for generations perish. Many more will be uprooted from the territories of their ancestors and communities that sustain them because those places have become unlivable; others will sicken, be disabled, and die from infectious diseases new to their areas, to which they have no immunity. And a lack of resources—a result of grotesque global inequality—will prevent untold numbers from escaping or protecting themselves and the people they love from any of these impacts.
That is not insecurity; it is a human and species-wide disaster of catastrophic scale, and the answer cannot be to “secure,” to “enhance security,” or to talk of “climate-related security risks.” If we misname, and misunderstand, what this is a crisis of, we will misunderstand what we need to do to try to fix it.
What we need to do is transform the root causes of this catastrophe, which will take nothing short of a paradigm shift: from a model that conceives the purpose of economic activity as ever-increasing extraction, exploitation, and consumption of nature’s resources, and human labor, for the purpose of profit, to one which focuses on meeting human needs and ensuring the sustainability of the resources and ecosystems on which life depends. In other words, we need a feminist green transformation: a restructuring of production, consumption, and political-economic relations along truly sustainable pathways.
First steps could include developing a feminist political-economic analysis of the transnational actors and processes that present the largest threats to sustainable life on Earth; mapping routes to intervene in those processes; and articulating policy alternatives that transform our understanding of the purposes of economic activity and of humans’ relation to the planet. We have been calling this a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet.”
As we have argued elsewhere, we need to unapologetically claim the mantle of “realism” for an economic system based on an ethics of care—for people and planet—over the short-sighted, destructive ethic of unlimited individualistic acquisition and corporate consolidation of wealth; a system that recognizes interdependence—among people and among nations—as the basis for mutual collaborative action, rather than mutual armament. One that recognizes that the goal of sufficiency, of ensuring livelihoods and lives of dignity, will never be achieved in a system that deepens, rather than transforms, inequalities.
This was the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights' second Fall 2021 webinar, which took place on Thursday, December 2nd from 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. EST (UTC-5). You can watch a recording of the webinar on our website here, or on our YouTube channel here.
Toxic Extraction and Corporate Criminality
Anna Zalik
Inspired by the work of critical scholars of corporate crime, as well as broader calls for both reparations to colonized and racialized peoples and abolition of carceral systems, Zalik's presentation considers the contradictory forms in which criminality and violence have been interpreted in the context of extractive industry operations. A number of historical and contemporary global examples will be considered: in the longer term, questions of colonial state control over land and its appropriation from Indigenous peoples; in the medium term, the toxic legacy of oil, gas and other extractive industries - particularly in regions where BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) reside; and in the immediate term, the role of the policing and criminal justice system in disputes between corporations and communities negatively affected by extraction. Substantive solutions will be considered, including those specific to: a) extractive firm governance, including public ownership of energy and industrial infrastructure, an end to firm subsidies and restriction of hydrocarbon production; and b) the criminal justice system - ranging from the development of a substantive transnational system for corporate criminal prosecution to the more categorical change proposed by the prison abolition movement.
Exposing Mines as Sites of Crime Against Women
Catherine Coumans
Coumans’s presentation draws on studies that expose violence experienced by community women and female workers at mine sites, as well as on her own work with victims of rape by police and security at mines in Papua New Guinea and Tanzania. She discusses resistance strategies and agency of the women themselves, as well as recommendations emerging out of joint work by victims of violence, researchers, and corporate accountability activists. These recommendations address persistent impunity in regard to corporate criminality, weak responses by governments and international bodies, such as the United Nations, and corporate strategies that deflect policy focus and resources from efforts to establish binding mechanisms in home countries of multinationals to strengthen prevention of harm and create pathways to legal remedy.
Commentary from the Field Perspective
Marta Ruedas
Ruedas will comment on the presentations from the perspective of a practitioner, reflecting on the real-life feasibility of using the ideas and recommendations made by Zalik and Coumans in a recovery or peace-building context. She will use examples from specific crisis contexts to illustrate elements that might need to be taken into account, as well as how government, international community and NGO actors might play into different scenarios.
A new article, "Women, War and Climate Change," co-authored by Claire Duncanson and Carol Cohn has been published on War Resisters' International, for The Broken Rifle magazine.
Originally published on the International Feminist Journal of Politics Blog.
Written by Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson
The 20th anniversary of UNSCR 1325 in October this year has been an occasion of reflection for feminist peace activists around the world. What has been achieved? What is still to be done? Most agree that the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda is far from meeting its goals of a gender-just sustainable peace. Despite many important interventions analyzing the reasons for lack of progress, here, here, here and here, few of the lamentations focus on what we think is one of the most profound challenges that will shape the realization of the WPS agenda in years to come: the climate crisis.
In our latest article in IFJP “Women, Peace and Security in a changing climate,” we argue that confronting the climate crisis must be understood as both practically and conceptually inextricable from the realization of the WPS agenda. If the goals of the WPS agenda are understood as ensuring women’s human security, ending and preventing wars, and building gender-just, sustainable peace, confronting the climate crisis must be foregrounded in our analyses and action.
How is the Climate Crisis Intrinsically Linked to WPS?
If it was the threat war posed to women’s human security that was at the heart of the WPS agenda, it is now clear that women’s human security – in fact all people’s – will never be attained unless we can also deal with the climate and ecological crises. The staggering impacts these crises will have and have already started to have on food security, livelihoods, health, access to water, and shelter, as well the displacement to which they contribute, make a mockery of the idea of human security. And as we know, all of these impacts have deeply gendered dimensions.
Even for those who construe the WPS agenda as centered on narrower, traditional understandings of security and warfare, climate breakdown still needs to be confronted, because of the ways it amplifies the well-documented drivers of armed conflict such as poverty, inequalities and economic shocks. Climate change may not directly cause violent conflict, but evidence suggests that climactic conditions in combination and interaction with socio-economic and political factors can intensify it. When, for example, societies cannot fairly distribute resources which climate breakdown has rendered increasingly scarce, such as water, arable lands, and pasturing lands, conditions for violent conflict are ripe. And increased militarization is often the state response, which further entails its own violences.
And finally, when we look at the heart of the WPS agenda, the goal of building gender-just peace that is sustainable, we see that climate disruption creates severe challenges to the project of peacebuilding—so much so that it must transform our understanding of how to build peace. We need to consider not only climate breakdown’s impacts on peacebuilding, but also the ways each decision made as part of peacebuilding will have impacts on climate breakdown and citizens’ ability to cope with it.
First, there are the many ways that climate breakdown undermines peacebuilding. Building peace requires the provision of jobs and livelihoods, at the same time as climate breakdown destroys the conditions for maintaining traditional livelihoods. Building peace requires addressing issues around land reform and restitution, at the very same time that climate breakdown reduces the quality and quantity of land available for sustaining livelihoods, and contributes to yet more people leaving their homes. Building peace requires dealing with the injuries caused by war as well as the health needs which went unaddressed during war, while climate breakdown puts additional pressure on health services through the rise in infectious diseases.
Second, as if climate breakdown’s effects on peacebuilding were not already enough of a challenge to how we imagine doing successful peacebuilding, WPS advocates will also need to consider the effects of peacebuilding on climate disruption, and on citizen’s resources to cope with it. For example, decisions about postwar economic recovery – e.g., about jobs and livelihoods, land reform, infrastructure – should not only consider the key peacebuilding question of whether they deepen or transform pre-existing inequalities (e.g., do transport infrastructure plans prioritize local level feeder roads, access to markets, healthcare and schools, or only main highways and railways to facilitate large scale resource extraction?). Now, these policy decisions must also be made in light of their effects on climate disruption and must assess whether the proposed solutions will be sustainable as the climate continues to change.
In the somewhat longer term, the climate crisis not only necessitates a rethink of how to do peacebuilding; it also threatens the entire project of peacebuilding. The almost unimaginably increasing scale of humanitarian crises that will be caused by the climate crisis in the next decades will devastate economies, disrupt our already-unequal systems of meeting basic human needs, and subsume massive amounts of financial, governmental, physical and human resources. Consider the 2020 coronavirus pandemic – itself arguably a product of human’s ecosystem destruction—and the economic losses and social costs it has produced, and the scale of resources that have been required to respond to it. And then add the economic costs and human misery arising from more frequent and intense storms, fires, droughts, and coastal flooding, as well as the loss of arable land and the spread of other infectious diseases. Given the already tremendously inadequate resources and attention given to post-war humanitarian response, peace agreement implementation, and post-war reconstruction, is it realistic to think that the resources required for peacebuilding will not be subsumed by the humanitarian and economic disasters caused by deepening climate and ecological crises?
What’s wrong with current responses to the climate crisis?
When it comes to responses to the climate crisis, as with the quest to build peace, to the extent that women’s activities, knowledge, and solutions ever get acknowledged, it is their local, small scale efforts. While these efforts may at times be recognized, or even glorified in “sustainability savior” discourse, at a wider policy level they are not viewed as significant, not seen as relevant to the scale required to solve the problem – and they are then certainly never funded or invested in at a scale that would, in fact, have a larger impact. The strategy of supporting local, democratically controlled solutions could actually be seen as a large-scale strategy requiring large scale investment; but its associations with women and the “feminine,” along with the associations of centralized, technocratic solutions with the “masculine,” help make it appear ‘self-evident’ that the latter is the most “realistic” path.
In our article, we argue that to survive this climate emergency, we need nothing short of a paradigm shift: a feminist green transformation. In arguing for such a transformation, we are not just making another call for green economies, or green new deals, which are too often market-based approaches that involve the commodification and enclosure of resources and commons, undermining livelihoods, justifying land- and green-grabs and dispossessing local people, especially women food producers. Too often, their attention to gendered power relations and global justice issues is all but non-existent. Instead, we are calling for a restructuring of production, consumption and political–economic relations along truly sustainable pathways, with feminist analysis at the core.
What ways forward for WPS given the context of climate breakdown?
The WPS story – the invention of the WPS agenda, the creation of an architecture meant to actualize it, the fight to get it implemented, and the many inventive ways in which women around the world have found to employ it in their struggles – is in many ways a heroic one. It is also a painfully frustrating one, if you consider the quantities of time, thought, organization, and energy that have been poured into it, in contrast to how little progress there has been in changing the male-dominated war system and the terrible price that women pay for it, and how very far away we are from the goal of gender-just sustainable peace.
But what must be acknowledged, now more than ever, is that this effort has not only been heroic and frustrating, a story in which our goals can be reached if only we can better mobilize to vanquish those who would stand in the way of WPS progress; it is a story that has to change. It is an agenda that has to change, in part because it was, for complex political reasons, limited even in its own time, and in part because it is now utterly inadequate to the time and the crisis in which we live.
Climate breakdown will multiply and intensify the problems that the WPS agenda aims to solve, it will severely deplete the already anemic resources available to deal with them, and it will rob us of the luxury of time to engage in working for small wins through bureaucratic business as usual. The twentieth anniversary of UNSCR 1325, then, must be seized as a vital opportunity – not only to reflect on the WPS agenda, but also on the ways in which it, and we, are uneasily situated in the current historical moment, and on the urgency of devising new approaches to the challenges to come. Imagine what could happen if even half of the feminist thought, energy, and action that has gone into WPS advocacy were now turned loose on envisioning and effecting the paradigm shifts that are now so desperately needed.
As we argue in our article, and elsewhere, we need to develop a feminist political economic analysis of the transnational actors and processes that threaten the sustainability of both peace and the planet. We need to map routes of intervention in those processes. And we need to articulate policy alternatives based in transformational approaches to our understanding of the nature and purposes of economic activity, and of humans’ relation to the planet. We have been calling this a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace”. In this short time we have to envision, promulgate and enact the paradigm shift needed to reverse the current path to climate catastrophe, it is our hope and belief that the Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace can make an important contribution.
Read the full article: Women, Peace and Security in a changing climate
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Carol Cohn (she/her/hers) is the founding Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights. She works across scholarly, policy, and activist communities to create the multidimensional, feminist gendered analyses that are imperative to finding sustainable and just solutions – not only to wars, but to the structural inequalities and environmental crises that underlie them. Her scholarship has addressed topics such as the gender dimensions of nuclear and national security discourse, gender mainstreaming in international security institutions, gender integration issues in the US military, and the strengths and limitations of the international Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and she has published a textbook on Women and Wars (Polity Press). Her current focus is on bringing feminist political economic analysis into both the Sustaining Peace and the WPS agendas through a collaborative international knowledge-building project to create a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” . Recent work in that project includes “Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Postwar States” co-authored with Claire Duncanson, in the Review of International Political Economy. In honor of the US presidential election, she has published “‘Cocked and Loaded’: Trump and the Gendered Discourse of National Security,” in Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton (Cambridge University Press).
Claire Duncanson (she/her/hers) is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on issues relating to gender, peace, and security. Her current work aims to bring a feminist analysis to the political economy of building peace, and she works with Carol Cohn on the “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” project.
Recent publications include Gender and Peacebuilding (Polity Press), “Beyond Liberal vs Liberating: Women’s Economic Empowerment in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security Agenda” in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and (co-authored with Carol Cohn) “Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Post-War States” in the Review of International Political Economy. She is also an active member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and has co-authored with fellow WILPF member Vanessa Farr on the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Afghanistan for Sara Davies and Jacqui True’s Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace, and Security.
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