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From rhetoric to inaction : the failure to implement gender norms in the United Nations Organization mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

University of British Columbia

Since the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, rhetoric on gender has become increasingly prevalent within the United Nations and among member states. In 1999, the International Criminal Court and the Rome Statute made forms of war crimes and crimes against humanity when committed in context of armed conflict. Additionally, in 2001 the United Nations Security Council through resolution 1325 called for the protection of women in conflict and for an inclusion of gender mainstreaming in all peace operations. Discussions on gender norms within the United Nations and among member states reached their peak as fresh and widespread violence, targeted against women and girls broke out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While this presented an auspicious opportunity for rhetorical norms on gender and peacekeeping to be put into practice within the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC), few of these rhetorical norms were successfully implemented. This, then, is a case study of the difficulty of moving from the rhetorical commitment of an international norm to its implementation. In particular, when the actors needed to advance the implementation of the norm have failed to complete the institutionalization and internalization process. It argues that the implementation of gender norms has not been successful in MONUC because of a failure of individual states and the United Nations bureaucracy to institutionalize and internalize these gender norms. Finally, it concludes that member states have failed to provide the resources and training required to implement gender norms, while United Nations bureaucracy has failed to establish a mandate and objectives that effectively respond to the needs of women.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-03-04

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/5530

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/