Engendering
Security Sector Reform:
A Workshop Report
What progress has been made in integrating gender into security sector
reform (SSR)? What issues concerning gender and SSR require further attention?
This report documents a workshop held at the Free University of Berlin in November
2008 on ‘Engendering Security Sector Reform’. It finds that the debate on
gender and SSR is still only incipient and that many questions remain
unanswered. SSR will only live up to its ambitious aspirations if it places
gender squarely at the centre of its conceptual thinking and practice.
Given the normative concerns of SSR it would seem that gender issues should
be central to the conceptualisation and practice of SSR. Yet until recently
gender concerns have been marginal to SSR policy. In the past few years,
however, major institutions involved in SSR have increasingly recognised the
centrality of gender to the conceptualisation and practice of SSR.
Papers presented at the workshop highlighted a number of points, including
the following:
- Gender-sensitive SSR must focus on all security
institutions rather than just the police and on men as well as women.
There is also a need for a post-colonial perspective and for consideration
of institutional culture, power and decision-making.
- The Gender and SSR Toolkit fills the need for policy
advice and guidelines on integrating gender into SSR. The toolkit attempts
to link gender across the entire range of security institutions and offers
practical advice for those working in the field.
- Gender concerns were more consciously and successfully
integrated in SSR in Liberia than in Sierra Leone. In both cases,
significant shortfalls remain and much is still to be done towards
establishing a gender-sensitive security sector.
- The cases of the Solomon Islands, Timor Leste and Haiti
show how socio-economic developments in post-conflict societies affect
options for living out specific masculine roles.
- Police in refugee camps in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda
often do not take sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) seriously and
are even involved in it. Community-based security arrangements can help to
tackle SGBV, but may not promote gender equality.
- The new chapter on gender and SSR in the OECD Handbook
on SSR is an important step forward in addressing gender concerns. The
focus must now be on implementing the guidelines contained in the chapter.
The
debate on conceptualising the importance of gender analysis in SSR, what
aspects to focus on and limits to integrating gender into SSR remains
incipient. This is clear from the list of topics for future research on gender
and SSR, which include:
- intelligence services and gender, traditional justice
mechanisms and gender and men, masculinities and SSR;
- case studies on gender and SSR with documented
outcomes, and rigorous comparative analysis and explicit criteria for
measuring success and failure;
- conditions for institutional and cultural change;
- conceptual critiques of SSR and development policy with
regard to gender;
- the impact of intervention forces and their influence on
images of masculinity and/or security; and
- how to convert general recognition of the need to
integrate a gender perspective on SSR into specific programmes and
projects at the operational level.