Jasmine-Kim Westendorf's discomforting book investigates sexual misconduct by military peacekeepers and abuses perpetrated by civilian peacekeepers and non-UN civilian interveners. Based on extensive field research in Bosnia, Timor-Leste, and with the UN and humanitarian communities, Violating Peace uncovers a brutal truth about peacebuilding as Westendorf investigates how such behaviors affect the capacity of the international community to achieve its goals related to stability and peacebuilding, and its legitimacy in the eyes of local and global populations. As Violating Peace shows, when interveners perpetrate sexual exploitation and abuse, they undermine the operational capacity of the international community to effectively build peace after civil wars and to alleviate human suffering in crises. Furthermore, sexual misconduct by interveners poses a significant risk to the perceived legitimacy of the multilateral peacekeeping project, and the UN more generally, with ramifications for the nature and dynamics of UN in future peace operations. Westendorf illustrates how sexual exploitation and abuse relates to other challenges facing UN peacekeeping, and shows how such misconduct is deeply linked to the broader cultures and structures within which peacekeepers work, and which shape their perceptions of and interactions with local communities. Effectively preventing such behaviors is crucial to global peace, order, and justice. Violating Peace thus identifies how policies might be improved in the future, based on an account of why they have failed to date.

This book critically re-evaluates the problem of sex between international personnel and local people and offers regulatory solutions to legal problems.

The deployment of a large number of soldiers, police officers and civilian personnel inevitably has various effects on the host society and economy, not all of which are in keeping with the peacekeeping mandate and intent or are easily discernible prior to the intervention. This book is one of the first attempts to improve our understanding of unintended consequences of peacekeeping operations, by bringing together field experiences and academic analysis. The aim of the book is not to discredit peace operations but rather to improve the way in which such operations are planned and managed.

Peacekeeping has become a major international undertaking throughout the world, from Africa to the Americas, from Europe to Southeast Asia. Yet until now, there has been no systematic analysis of the key role of gender in post-cold war conflicts and of post-conflict peacekeeping efforts. This groundbreaking volume explores how gender has become a central factor in shaping current thinking about the causes and consequences of armed conflict, complex emergencies, and reconstruction. Drawing on expertise ranging from the highest levels of international policymaking down to the daily struggle to implement peacekeeping operations, this work represents the full span of knowledge and experience about international intervention in local crises. Presenting a rich array of examples from Angola, Bosnia Herzegovina, East Timor, El Salvador, the former Yugoslavia, Guatemala, Haiti, Kosovo, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, and Serbia, the authors offer important insights for future peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.

Despite reforms that have realized major improvements, gender power imbalances within and through peacekeeping missions continue to pose major challenges. Sabrina Karim and Kyle Beardsley explore how increasing the representation of women, particularly through an "equal opportunity" framework, will help peacekeeping operations become more of a vehicle for gender equality globally.

Sex and World Peace is a groundbreaking demonstration that the security of women is a vital factor in the occurrence of conflict and war, unsettling a wide range of assumptions in political and security discourse. Harnessing an immense amount of data, it relates microlevel violence against women and macrolevel state peacefulness across global settings. The authors find that the treatment of women informs human interaction at all levels of society. They call attention to the adverse effects on state security of sex-based inequities such as sex ratios favoring males, the practice of polygamy, and lax enforcement of national laws protecting women. Their research challenges conventional definitions of security and democracy and common understandings of the causes of world events. The book considers a range of ways to remedy these injustices, including top-down and bottom-up approaches to redressing violence against women and the lack of sex parity in decision-making. Advocating a state responsibility to protect women, the authors campaign against women’s systemic insecurity, which threatens the security of all. Sex and World Peace has been a go-to book for instructors, advocates, and policy makers since its publication in 2012. Since then, there have been major changes in world affairs, including the #MeToo movement, as well as advances in both theoretical and empirical literature surrounding the subject. This second edition, which adds coauthors Rose McDermott and Donna Lee Bowen alongside Valerie M. Hudson and Mary Caprioli, revises and updates the book for a new generation. The book retains its foundational overview of the relationship between women’s oppression and war, enhanced by fresh data and new material covering recent developments for global women’s rights and analysis of additional examples of gender and conflict throughout the world.

This volume explores the implementation of key gender policies in international peace and security, following the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 1325 in October 2000, the first thematic resolution on Women, Peace and Security. How should we understand women’s participation in peace processes and in peace operations? And what forms of gendered security dynamics are present in armed conflict and international interventions? These questions represent central themes of protection and participation that the international community has to address in order to implement UNSCR 1325. Thus far, the implementation has often employed varying approaches related to gender mainstreaming, a third theme of the resolution. Yet, there is a dearth of systematic data which until recently has restricted the ability of researchers to evaluate the progress in implementation and impact of UNSCR 1325. By engaging with both empirics and critical theory, the authors of this edited volume make important contributions to the gender, peace and security agenda. They identify some of the problems of implementing UNSC 1325 and offer a sobering assessment of progress of implementation and insights into how to advance our understanding through systematic research. Many of the chapters are focused on operational aspects of UNSCR 1325, but all also engage with the theoretical underpinnings of UNSCR 1325 to bring forth central debates on more fundamental challenges to the development of knowledge in the fields of gender, peace and security. This book will be of much interest to students of gender studies, peace and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general.