The Global Gender Agenda
In 2000, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325, codifying the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) legal and conceptual framework. The framework calls for “The inclusion of women in all conflict resolution processes; women’s participation in security leadership roles; and the recognition of the gender-based violence (GBV) that affects women and girls in these contexts.” Embraced across the international community and renewed as a theme of U.S. security cooperation activities, WPS continues to be the principal framework for gender mainstreaming and gender equity in the context of global security.
Championing the agenda, the U.S. government has adopted WPS principles in its own security sector while funding bi- and multi-lateral security cooperation events with a WPS and gender focus. In September 2022, I had the privilege of serving as an expert facilitator at such an event in Panama. My experience offers insights on how best to localize gender in Latin American security contexts and opportunities to overcome lingering barriers to women’s integration in regional security forces. The event also proved a winning formula for making the WPS agenda relevant, relatable, and durable – providing best practices for U.S. security cooperation within and far beyond Central and South America.
Panama City - Andy Korteling (Getty Images Stock Photo)
The Panama Workshop
The U.S. government’s Institute for Security Governance (ISG) hosted the week-long Panama Workshop at which I served as an expert WPS facilitator from the social enterprise Motive International. Designed to advance shared U.S.-Panama WPS goals, event participants included more than two dozen uniformed and civilian, male and female officials from different branches of Panama’s security agencies. My co-facilitators included officials from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and academia. Drawing on field research involving interviews with victims of GBV in Latin America, my training as a certified Gender Military Advisor for UN Peacekeeping, and my work consulting for international NGOs on gender policy, I facilitated sessions on UNSCR 1325, Women in Conflict, and violence targeting women and girls. As a Mexican citizen and native Spanish speaker, I was able to integrate comparative regional examples and lead sessions in participants’ own language.
““We are here to value the effort of what is women and peace””
Instead of informing Panamanian officials about the goals or principles of UNSCR 1325, my co-facilitators and I sought to explore complex themes of gender and security through various framing questions. Why should a patrol officer guarding the Darien Gap think about gender? What use does a UN framework have for a police officer in the city of Colon? Is the WPS agenda -- often couched in the context of inter-state war -- even relevant for Latin America? As opposed to lecture-based approaches that can reduce gender and security to mere abstractions, the ensuing dialogue made WPS relevant, relatable, and durable.
Localizing Gender and Security
In Latin America, a region sometimes regarded as “conflict-free” due to the absence of interstate war in recent decades, it is understandable some might question the relevance of the WPS agenda. Indeed, I encountered skepticism when I told colleagues I was participating in a DoD-hosted WPS workshop in Panama. Yet countless conflicts involving state security forces, criminal, and guerilla groups unfold across Latin America every day, and extreme prevalence of GBV make the region perhaps one of the most violent in the world for women and girls.
Despite great need, implementation of UNSCR 1325 in Central and South America has been sub-optimal. Political elites have crafted National Action Plans (NAPs) with country-specific goals, but policies have not always translated to uptake at institutional scale or by frontline security officials. In Latin America as in other regions, NAPs sometimes disregard the culture and needs of security institutions, lack sustained and sequenced activities, or overlook the security threats that most impact women and girls. In Central and South America, for example, this includes femicide.
Perpetrated by ordinary misogynistic men and by criminal organizations, gangs, and sometimes security officials, targeted killing based on gender is a blunt manifestation of discrimination and the most extreme expression of GBV. Women and girls in Latin America are at risk of femicide both as non-combatants in areas where armed groups operate and are engaged in confrontation with state forces, and as members of criminal or guerilla organizations – the latter often at higher rates than their male counterparts. But security officials who participated in the Panama workshop said they’d spent little time considering femicide. This created an opening for me to present WPS principles on gender-based analysis of security threats and for participants to relate such principles to their jobs.
Law enforcement officials responded by offering that GBV patterns could help them map criminal networks. Others hypothesized that mobilizing female officers trained in GBV prevention or recovery could be a new way to engage victims both inside and outside armed groups. By making the link explicit between gender and local security threats, our approach in the Panama workshop proved the relevance of WPS for the region, while offering practical tools that grounded UNSCR 1325 policy in the everyday challenges of frontline security professionals.
Making Gender Integration Relatable
The past two decades have seen great progress on gender equality and female participation in Latin Americas security sector institutions. Central and South American states have expanded rights for women to serve in the armed forces. At least three Latin American countries now boast female combat pilots. Women routinely deploy from the region as part of UN peacekeeping missions, earning acclaim such as when Lieutenant Commander Marcia Andrade Braga, a female Brazilian peacekeeper serving in the Central African Republic was awarded the United Nations Military Gender Advocate of the Year Award in 2019.
But gender integration in Latin American armed forces has also promulgated restrictive gender stereotypes by embracing women only in roles viewed as acceptably feminine, such as nurses or support functions. Participants in the Panama workshop agreed women were often stigmatized if they sought leadership or frontline roles, proving there is still work to be done to achieve WPS goals on gender equity in Latin American security institutions. This is an area ripe for continued U.S. leadership, as well as relatable human stories.
Speaking at the South American Defense Conference in Ecuador in September 2022, General Laura Richardson, Commander of U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) and the first female commander of a U.S. Geographic Combatant Command, said it “must be a core value…to ensure…all talented people can actively contribute to the safety of [their] citizens and region.” By emphasizing the imperative of gender integration, statements by prominent U.S. officials are a vital complement to security cooperation activities like the Panama workshop that explore the topic with mid-ranking officials. Undeniably, General Richardson’s own story of success rising to the highest rank in the U.S. Army humanizes gender integration in the armed forces, as do outlets that profile women around the world holding leadership and frontline security roles. The public-facing series “Breaking Barriers” produced by USSOUTHCOM's WPS Program is a great example of this and are vital for making WPS relatable.
Such efforts complement intimate workshops like the one in Panama that take relatability of gender equity in security institutions, and of WPS writ large, to a deeply personal level. One Panamanian female participant shared a story about the failures of abuse-prevention protocols in her own organization, prompting discussion among the group about how lack of gender equity can erode morale and impede unit effectiveness. Others described encountering instances of GBV against men during their work and the specific challenges in this type of violence that is often invisible.
A Winning Formula for U.S. Leadership on WPS
For almost all the Panamanian participants, the workshop was their first exposure to the WPS framework, though everyone was quick to make connections to their own country, organizations, and personal experiences. Some came away with ideas on how to operationalize WPS principles in the context of ongoing security operations. Others seemed demonstrably more aware of the need for institutional reforms to increase gender equity in their own organizations. The intimate scale and tone of the workshop allowed sensitive topics to surface and revealed opportunities for individual participants to act. High levels of engagement suggest content was “sticking,” and that the event would have lasting results.
I believe WPS initiatives like the Panama workshop are effective for at least three reasons: One, they allow facilitators and participants to frame gender in the context of localized security challenges, making WPS regionally relevant. Second, they engage working-level security officials through intimate and interactive dialogue, making WPS personally relatable to those vital for its implementation. Third, they situate UNSCR 1325 outside the realm of policy and into the realm of practice, making WPS institutionally durable, and by extension, less vulnerable to shifting politics or dependent on elite champions.
Whether in Latin America or elsewhere, relevance, relatability, and durability is a winning formula for U.S. security cooperation on WPS and can advance this vital agenda that aims to deliver the peace and security too many women and girls still lack.