The Marginalization of Women in UN Counter-Terrorism Work
By: Anwar Mhanje, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Stonehill College
Although counterterrorism policies, directly and indirectly, affect women, the cost of these policies on women remains unexplored by international counterterrorism actors.
In the unique cases where women are addressed in counterterrorism discourses, they often strengthen damaging gender stereotypes of women as the victims or wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers of terrorist actors
Let’s look back in history.
Even though the UN General Assembly adopted the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy on 8 September 2006, women’s issues were not included in counterterrorism initiatives until 2013 when the General Assembly adopted resolution 68/178. The resolution called on Member States “to shape, review and implement all counter-terrorism measures in accordance with the principles of gender equality and non-discrimination.”
Also, during the fourth periodic review of the Global Counterterrorism Strategy in 2014, a resolution was passed that encouraged Member States, UN agencies, and international and regional organizations to “consider the participation of women in efforts to prevent and counter-terrorism.”
This was followed with a Security Council resolution 2178 (2014) on the risk posed by foreign fighters, in which the Council addressed women’s empowerment as a way to counter extremist violence and radicalization.
Furthermore, in its Presidential Statement of October 2014, the Security Council encouraged Member States to engage with women’s organizations in developing counterterrorism strategies.
In 2015, the UN started to gradually address these gaps by introducing a gender dimension into the United Nations Global Counterterrorism Strategy. The Counterterrorism Committee (CTC) held an open briefing on ‘The Role of Women in Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism’, during which the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) highlighted the consequences of counterterrorism efforts on women’s rights. In the same year, the Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 2242, which linked women’s participation with sustainable peace and security, including counterterrorism efforts. The resolution urges Member States and the UN to include women in the development of counterterrorism strategies.
Moreover, General Assembly resolution 70/291 which was passed in 2016 called upon Member States and UN agencies to consider “the impacts of counter-terrorism strategies on women’s human rights and women’s organizations and to seek greater consultations with women and women’s organizations when developing strategies to counter terrorism and violent extremism conducive to terrorism.”
With all this work being done, women’s issues and rights yet again were not included in the four pillars of the Global Counterterrorism Strategy adopted by the General Assembly in 2016 establishing the global operational framework to counterterrorism. The Review invited Member States to work with women’s groups and integrate a gender analysis, but it did not adequately address human rights violations caused by counterterrorism strategies required under the often neglected 4th Pillar.
More recent efforts by the UN included the convening of the first-ever United Nations High-level Conference on Counterterrorism on June 28th and 29th, 2018. This conference was inspired by the 2016 Review of the Global Counterterrorism Strategy. Also, the conference included only limited participation of women’s civil society organizations and lacked the recognition of the essential role women’s rights organizations played in mitigating the damage for women’s issues as a result of gender-blind counterterrorism strategies. These organizations are stepping in where women’s issues are neglected or deemed irrelevant and responding to the shortcomings of the strategy caused by lack of consideration and gender stereotypes.
The issues outlined earlier with the UN counterterrorism policies as it relates to women stem from and exacerbated by the lack of academic and policy studies of the link between women and counterterrorism. Due to the lack of investment in these studies, we are devising international policies without, for example, fully understanding how the detention, imprisonment, or targeted killing of individuals suspected of engaging in terrorist acts impact their families. We also do not know how combatant women experience counterterrorism measures and entities differently than their male counterparts. More research is needed to examine the effects of state counterterrorism policies on women.
Moreover, the uncritical absorption of the women’s issues into counterterrorism could instrumentalize women’s rights, rendering them as a tool for combating terrorism rather than an end in and of themselves. The securitization and instrumentalization of women’s rights can heighten women’s insecurity by marking them as visible tools ‘used’ by the government and this risk their empowerment in society. This increases the risk of a backlash against gender equality and women’s rights defenders in situations where women’s rights become identified with a broader agenda.
A study of the gendered effects of counterterrorism is essential for building a better understanding of the gendered impact of both gender-specific and gender-neutral counterterrorism measures. The unseen and collateral damage of counterinsurgency policies remains mostly undocumented.
