The Women In Blue Helmets

The Women in Blue HelmetsÊtells the story of the first all-female police unit deployed by India to the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia in January 2007. Lesley J. Pruitt investigates how the unit was originated, developed, and implemented, offering an important historical record of this unique initiative. Examining precedents in policing in the troop-contributing country and recent developments in policing in the host country, the book offers contextually rich examination of all-female units, explores the potential benefits of and challenges to womenÕs participation in peacekeeping, and illuminates broader questions about the relationship between gender, peace, and security.

The Women in Blue Helmets tells the story of the first all-female police unit deployed by India to the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia in January 2007. Lesley J. Pruitt investigates how the unit was originated, developed, and implemented, offering an important historical record of this unique initiative. Examining precedents in policing in the troop-contributing country and recent developments in policing in the host country, the book offers contextually rich examination of all-female units, explores the potential benefits of and challenges to women’s participation in peacekeeping, and illuminates broader questions about the relationship between gender, peace, and security.

The 1992–1995 battle for Sarajevo was the longest siege in modern history. It was also the most internationalized, attracting a vast contingent of aid workers, UN soldiers, journalists, smugglers, and embargo-busters. The city took center stage under an intense global media spotlight, becoming the most visible face of post-Cold War conflict and humanitarian intervention. However, some critical activities took place backstage, away from the cameras, including extensive clandestine trading across the siege lines, theft and diversion of aid, and complicity in the black market by peacekeeping forces. In Blue Helmets and Black Markets, Peter Andreas traces the interaction between these formal front-stage and informal backstage activities, arguing that this created and sustained a criminalized war economy and prolonged the conflict in a manner that served various interests on all sides. Although the vast majority of Sarajevans struggled for daily survival and lived in a state of terror, the siege was highly rewarding for some key local and international players. This situation also left a powerful legacy for postwar reconstruction: new elites emerged via war profiteering and an illicit economy flourished partly based on the smuggling networks built up during wartime. Andreas shows how and why the internationalization of the siege changed the repertoires of siege-craft and siege defenses and altered the strategic calculations of both the besiegers and the besieged. The Sarajevo experience dramatically illustrates that just as changes in weapons technologies transformed siege warfare through the ages, so too has the arrival of CNN, NGOs, satellite phones, UN peacekeepers, and aid convoys. Drawing on interviews, reportage, diaries, memoirs, and other sources, Andreas documents the business of survival in wartime Sarajevo and the limits, contradictions, and unintended consequences of international intervention. Concluding with a comparison of the battle for Sarajevo with the sieges of Leningrad, Grozny, and Srebrenica, and, more recently, Falluja, Blue Helmets and Black Markets is a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary urban warfare, war economies, and the political repercussions of humanitarian action.

Women play many roles during wartime. This compelling study brings together the work of foremost scholars on women and war to address questions of ethnicity, women and the war complex, peacemaking, motherhood, and more. It leaves behind outdated arguments about militarist men and pacifist women, while still recognizing differences in men's and women's relationships to war. .

Born in 1945, the United Nations came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post–Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book’s claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume collects some of the finest scholars and practitioners writing about the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states. This is a landmark book—a close and informed study of the UN in the region that taught the organization how to do its many jobs.

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is celebrated as a landmark global framework for achieving gender equality in peace and security governance. Its power is visible in two decades of United Nations resolutions, national action plans, regional initiatives, and countless activist, academic, and philanthropic projects. Yet despite this vitality, it is haunted by failure, as a lack of political will and stubborn patriarchal resistance frustrate its promise. This book offers a groundbreaking critical account of the WPS agenda, exploring its evolution in relation to the wider politics of global governance and feminism. Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd argue that WPS is not a settled, cohesive policy but a field in flux, defined and disrupted by a growing number of national, supranational, subnational, and transnational agents who in turn act on an expanding catalogue of threats, from climate change to homophobia, challenging traditional boundaries of peace and security. Kirby and Shepherd reconceptualize WPS as a “policy ecosystem,” tracing interaction and contestation around the agenda across levels from the UN Security Council to military alliances to feminist activists. They combine analysis of a vast dataset of policy documents with key informant interviews and close readings of diplomacy, statecraft, the politics of indigeneity, counterinsurgency, antimilitarism, human rights, and the arms trade across the first twenty years of WPS. Far-reaching and incisive, Governing the Feminist Peace poses a provocative question: What if we abandoned the idea of the WPS agenda as a unified political project altogether?

Indispensable for the student or researcher studying women's history, this book draws upon a wide array of cultural settings and time periods in which women displayed agency by carrying out their daily economic, familial, artistic, and religious obligations. Since record keeping began, history has been written by a relatively few elite men. Insights into women's history are left to be gleaned by scholars who undertake careful readings of ancient literature, examine archaeological artifacts, and study popular culture, such as folktales, musical traditions, and art. For some historical periods and geographic regions, this is the only way to develop some sense of what daily life might have been like for women in a particular time and place. This reference explores the daily life of women across civilizations. The work is organized in sections on different civilizations from around the world, arranged chronologically. Within each society, the encyclopedia highlights the roles of women within five broad thematic categories: the arts, economics and work, family and community life, recreation and social customs, and religious life. Included are numerous sidebars containing additional information, document excerpts, images, and suggestions for further reading.

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2015 im Fachbereich Politik - Thema: Frieden und Konflikte, Sicherheit, Note: 1,7, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Children, women and men in conflict areas are not only affected by the more obvious forms of violence, but too often also have to face all forms of gender-based violence, including rape, prostitution, trafficking etc. Although the United Nations (UN) send their peacekeeping troops with the goal to establish and maintain peace and the well-being of the local civilians, some bluehelmets use their position to sexually violate the vulnerable population. However, as worse as only these violations might be, often the negative effects do not stop with the mere act. A whole range of problems is closely related to sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA): infections of HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancies and abandoned children, making the victims suffer double. Although there exists a comprehensive legal framework regarding sexual violence, the problem obviously continues to exist as statistics of the number of allegations per year reveal: 105 in 2004, 340 in 2005, 82 in 2006, 136 in 2007, 111 in 2008; 154 in 2009. In the light of this shocking high rates of assaults, one must not forget however, that only the officially registered allegations are enlisted, the dark figure is estimated to be even several times higher if one considers the chronic under-reporting in post-conflict areas. Bearing in mind, this thesis focuses on the responses given by the UN to the problem of sexual abuse and exploitation of women, men, girls and boys by bluehelmets during peacekeeping missions. The central question is therefore: What has been done so far and what else needs to be done? Since it is essential to first try to understand why violations of sexual nature continue to occur in the first place to be able to derive possible responses and solutions to combat this problem, chapter 2 “Factors promoting the continuance of SEA and under-reporting” will focus on the context conditions that foster the increased likelihood of assaults. In the next chapter, this thesis will give an overview of the major responses given by the UN. Due to a lack of concrete and detailed statistics as well as deeper and comparative case studies, it won't be able to determine the effectiveness of these measures implemented until now. However, some obvious flaws will be pointed out and further necessary actions and measures presented in chapter 4 “What more needs to be done?”