Cori Fleser
Introduction
The 2022 NATO Strategic Concept, which was adopted in June and supersedes a 2010 version, is known for several significant firsts, including a focus on China and an emphasis on climate change. Another important first concerns the need to integrate “human security and the Women, Peace and Security agenda” across all of NATO’s core tasks: deterrence and defense; crisis prevention and management; and cooperative security. The Strategic Concept—which provides a security diagnosis that is meant to influence policy—highlights gender equality as a reflection of NATO’s values. It also calls attention to the disproportionate impact of pervasive instability, including conflict-related sexual violence, on women, children, and minority groups. This inclusion reflects agreement among allies that gender equality and human security are core components of individual and collective security.
Allies are witnessing the linkage between gender and human security in real time through the Russian war in Ukraine. As the war enters its six month, nearly each week brings new reports of war crimes, genocide, and sexual violence perpetrated by Russian forces against Ukrainians. Since the February invasion, the Kremlin has intentionally targeted Ukrainian civilians in bread lines, apartment buildings, schools, churches, and hospitals, while employing disinformation campaigns to obfuscate the reality of Putin’s “special military operation” from the Russian public. By the end of May, Ukraine had identified more than six hundred Russian war crime suspects. While Ukraine is not a member of the Alliance, the outcome of the war in Ukraine—and human security of its citizens—is of vital importance to NATO, European security, and the rules-based international order emphasized throughout this Strategic Concept.
Some advocates have encouraged NATO to be more proactive in addressing gender and human security issues in Ukraine. NATO has policies and guidelines on the protection of civilians; women, peace, and security; children and armed conflict; and conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence, and action plans or handbooks to support their implementation. These frameworks, however, only apply to NATO-led operations and no such operations currently exist in Ukraine. In a war where NATO is not directly involved, but can readily see the impact on Ukrainian civilians, what does implementing policies on women, peace, and security and human security look like? How should NATO allies understand and account for the human security challenges in their bilateral assistance to Ukraine? Beyond the NATO policy documents and the global United Nations Security Council mandates, the gendered nature of the conflict in Ukraine is a core component of examining the war, its impact on civilians, and planning-informed military action. Many allies have the information and capabilities to address such human-centered issues—they just need to incorporate them in their bilateral military assistance. This is more possible than it seems.
With the evolving conflict dynamic in Ukraine, humanitarian organizations such as UN Women and CARE International have published comprehensive analyses highlighting gender dynamics and human insecurity in Ukraine as a result of Russia’s aggressive military campaign. These analyses show, for example, that the majority of people fleeing Ukraine are women, girls, and boys, as Ukrainian men between the ages of eighteen and sixty have been conscripted to fight; the crisis is largely exacerbating preexisting gender and intersectional inequalities and discrimination; and incidents of gender-based violence, particularly domestic violence and conflict-related sexual violence, are reportedly increasing. The gender analyses come with recommendations for humanitarian actors, operating in Ukraine and neighboring countries, which have been vital in providing tailored services, shelter, and care for Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced people.
The analytical products also are useful for militaries, which often excel at analyzing and distilling information to inform their operations and activities. Gender analysis provides militaries with a comprehensive range of information about the different ways the war in Ukraine is impacting civilians based on social norms and behaviors associated with their identity as a man, woman, or gender diverse person and other identity characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, or disability status. For example, a single Ukrainian man over the age of sixty with a physical disability has had different challenges and experiences, and will make different decisions about his needs during this conflict than a Roma woman in her twenties who is married with three children. While this may seem intuitive, these are important details for responding to the unique and different needs of the estimated 12.8 million displaced Ukrainians from both a humanitarian and military perspective.
A gender analysis centers people—not the nation state, weapons, or equipment—when understanding security needs and interventions for the purposes of providing support, which in this case is to Ukraine. As the war continues and allied militaries increasingly deploy forces to locations across Eastern Europe, information gleaned through gender analyses will contribute to military planning for contingencies. Such information can ensure that military assistance and planned operations do not further exacerbate the deteriorating human security conditions on the ground. The challenge for militaries is often articulating the change in their tasks, requirements, or capabilities to respond to such conditions.
The sections below seek to highlight some of the salient gender-based information for allied militaries to better understand the human security environment in Ukraine. This brief does not suggest that other information is not germane or should be ignored, but rather seeks to distill information relevant for shaping current and future allied military responses. This brief does not argue that gender analysis can or should be used to wage war more effectively from a purely military operational perspective. It takes the position that to be considered militarily effective, military action must meet its desired objectives while mitigating cost and negative impact on civilians and humanitarian actors operating in the same space.
The Kremlin’s gender playbook
The Kremlin has intentionally targeted and exploited societal gender fault lines through hybrid warfare as a reliable tactic for destabilizing cohesion and unity among populations throughout Europe. Though its hybrid campaigns focus on many issues, gender issues are some of the most divisive and polarizing for local populations, making them ripe for targeted disinformation. In the Ukraine conflict, for example, the Kremlin accused a woman who gave birth in the immediate aftermath of the Mariupol maternity hospital bombing of being an actress paid by Ukraine to sow uncertainty about the reality of its operations. Separately, the Kremlin has continued to deny allegations that Russian forces committed acts of rape and sexual violence against Ukrainians, discrediting the claims as a hoax.
This is not a new tactic for Moscow. To maintain a level of control and influence in post-Soviet states, the Kremlin has historically weaponized gender. Disinformation campaigns attack LGBTQ+ and women activists, politicians, and other leaders to discredit them, humiliate them, or place them in a heightened risk of retaliatory violence. This weaponization is a notorious tactic of authoritarian and aspiring authoritarian regimes to degrade efforts toward democratization. In Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine, for example, rolling back LGBTQ+ and women’s rights has been a canary in the coal mine for the Kremlin’s influence in the face of democratic progress in those countries. Russian disinformation has succeeded—across Europe and in North America—in weaponizing sexist, racist, and homophobic belief sets within influential and excitable demographics to shift outcomes in elections and undercut democracy. Russia’s influence campaigns often proliferate the falsehood that expanding rights for women and LGBTQ+ individuals takes away rights from others. They link this expansion of rights for all to “Western influence” in a bid to undermine democratic movements, political candidates, and partnerships between post-Soviet states and the European Union and NATO. To the Kremlin, democratic progress within post-Soviet states is a threat to Russia’s traditional values and puts the future of Russia in danger.
In his speeches on Ukraine, Putin consistently references his goal of defending Russian “traditions” and “culture” as a justification for the Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Putin’s calculated messaging is intended to demonstrate linkages in defending a shared national Russian identity rooted in traditional gender roles, norms, and expectations among Russian and Ukrainian men and women. His messaging is intended to “other,” or establish an “us versus them” mentality, both at the national level toward NATO and the West and at the individual level toward those who challenge status quo norms and seek to expand sociocultural gender roles, rights, and responsibilities to evolve Ukrainian society. In this way, Putin proliferates his own connections between individual identity and collective security. So when Putin claims Russia is being “threatened” by NATO at its borders, he is not only speaking of the political-military Alliance—but also the democratic world order that NATO stands for and the expansion of rights and liberties for all.
Since the Russian invasion, the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare campaigns have flooded the information environment with justifications for its invasion, denials of mass atrocities, and other mischaracterizations of the truth to breed uncertainty about the war among Russians, Ukrainians, and global audiences. The narrative, themes, and mechanisms for spreading Russian disinformation account for and exploit gender fault lines among the local populace to weaken societal cohesion and resilience. As allied militaries monitor the information environment from their capitals and establish their forces in Eastern Europe, they cannot afford to overlook Russia’s weaponization of gender as part of its campaign of aggression in Ukraine.
Conflict-related sexual violence: A tactic of the war in Ukraine
International organizations and national and local nongovernmental organizations have warned of increases in conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) since the beginning of the invasion in February. NATO defines CRSV in its 2021 policy as “rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, forced sterilization, forced marriage and any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity perpetrated against women, men, girls or boys that is directly or indirectly linked to a conflict.” As the war in Ukraine evolves, these organizations continue to report on the increased risk of CRSV faced by women and girls since they are overrepresented in the refugee and internally displaced person populations. La Strada International, a European platform against human trafficking, has highlighted how established human trafficking avenues in Ukraine run by criminal organizations continue to put more Ukrainians at risk of human trafficking, including sexual slavery, the longer the war continues. The UN Refugee Agency reports that displaced LGBTQ+ people “frequently experience continued harm,” as they flee emergency situations in their home countries, in transit to new destinations, and upon arrival in places of asylum. This includes stigmatization, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, and exclusion from access to essential services, including gender-affirming healthcare. Transgender and gender diverse people fleeing Ukraine have reported challenges crossing the border into neighboring countries when their gender or physical presentation does not correspond with legal identity documents. Gender analyses have further highlighted the risk of forced marriage among the Roma population as a result of the conflict, reinforcing multiple forms of discrimination against Roma girls, and decreasing their ability to reach out for support of authorities, who may not want to interfere with what is perceived as a “cultural practice” of an ethnic group.
Separate but related are the reports that Russian forces inside Ukraine are intentionally using sexual violence as part of their military campaign to instill fear and impose physical and psychological harm and trauma on the Ukrainian population. Sexual violence, when used to wage war on a population, takes civilian bodies and centers them as the battleground where the warfighting tactics of torture and rape take place. This results in physical and psychological harm for survivors and witnesses of the violence, and has long-term impacts on the whole population. Sexual violence as a tactic of war is systematic and intentional; it is not a crime of opportunity in a chaotic environment. Recent surveys conducted in Ukraine indicate that 93 percent of Ukrainians have heard of rape or sexual assault by the Russian or pro-Russian forces, and 20 percent say that they personally know someone who has been raped or sexually assaulted by the Russian or pro-Russian troops since the invasion started on February 24, 2022. Most reporting indicates women are the primary targets of sexual violence; however, it is important to acknowledge that younger men and boys, specifically, may be particularly at risk. Given the more rigid and traditional gender roles prevalent in Ukraine, feelings of shame, embarrassment, or emasculation may prevent boys and younger men from reporting and seeking support. Sexual violence remains one of the most hidden crimes being committed against Ukrainians in this war.
CRSV is a dynamic of the war in Ukraine that allied militaries must plan for since they will ultimately encounter survivors of CRSV. Military forces and security sector actors, including local police forces, can leverage information from gender analyses to understand vulnerability and risk factors for different subgroups of refugees and internally displaced people as well as indications and warning of CRSV and exploitation. Understanding gender and other human factors—such as ethnicity, age, gender expression, and ability status—helps militaries make sense of civilian behavior and decision-making, which can be useful information for intelligence estimates and military plans. This can help frontline military actors distinguish friendly and adversarial actors and identify survivors, especially among high-risk groups such as women, children, LGBTQ+ populations, and ethnic minorities, to ensure they can safely access services from the humanitarian response effort. While it is not the remit of military forces to provide CRSV support services for survivors, allied militaries in bordering countries will ultimately come into contact with the civilian population seeking services and support as they flee Ukraine. Allied militaries should be prepared to engage civilians appropriately with consideration for risk factors and trauma that war imposes on people and, as part of their plans, identify the process for connecting survivors with humanitarian services.
The agency of Ukrainian women
The cautionary recommendation from many gender analyses is to not make gendered assumptions that Ukrainian women and girls are all victims in need of protection. If gender analyses are oversimplified when interpreted, military actors may conclude that women are inherently victims in need of protection and the de facto intervention is that (male) military actors are charged with protecting them—rather than seeing their contributions to the war effort and factoring this into their military assistance to Ukraine. Kateryna Cherepakha, president of the organization La Strada-Ukraine, cautions against viewing women as “mere victims” in this war. Summing up her view, a Norwegian opinion piece states: “Fortifying stereotypical assumptions of women as victims only can reinforce ideas about the need for a protective culture in which women’s agency and power are belittled.”
Since 2014, the Ukrainian military has reported a dramatic increase in women in the military—a rise directly attributed to the threat posed by Russia following the annexation of Crimea and the warfighting in the Donbas. Following the 2022 Russian invasion, an unknown number of women have joined the army or volunteered for civilian resistance efforts—as they did in World War I in the Austro-Hungarian army and in World War II in the Red Army. In the fight against Russian aggression, there are accounts of women in the Ukrainian forces defending their country as snipers, combat medics, artillery officers, and in other logistics and noncombat support roles. Women’s active contributions to the defense of Ukraine, amplified through the media, should shift the narrative surrounding women’s motivations and agency within this war. Acknowledging the different motivations of women for staying in Ukraine to fight further demonstrates women are not a homogenous group, and their motivations for fighting are not solely linked to their gender roles as family caregivers or relational to men as their wives, mothers, sisters, or aunts. Women’s agency—their ability to determine and act on their own individualized goals and motivations—is a core component of this war, whether they decide to stay in or leave Ukraine.
It may seem contradictory to discuss the risks faced by women and girls in this conflict and then highlight their agency—but it is not dichotomous. This is the complexity that gender analysis illuminates and the nuance it demands of interventions—humanitarian or military—in conflict-ridden situations. Eliminating wholesale assumptions of women’s victimization and examining their motivations is a critical piece of gender dynamics in conflict. It also helps outside actors detect the different challenges facing civilian Ukrainian men. The traditionally rigid roles ascribed to Ukrainian men and women have already morphed over the course of this war and will continue to change. For allied militaries, this means embedded planning assumptions about friendly forces and the civilian population cannot remain static, and instead need to adapt to account for gender-based changes as plans for future operations are adjusted based on new intelligence.
Women’s civil society networks are saving Ukrainians
In every locality around the world, there are local networks of women—often undetected by Western media, leaders, and other outside actors—operating across their communities and making lifesaving impacts. Women’s civil society networks often have the ground truth of conflict dynamics, and access that allows them to acutely understand and provide tailored services to address the human security challenges manifesting as a result of war. For example, at the border between Ukraine and neighboring countries such as Poland and Moldova, women’s rights organizations and civil society organizations have been critical to providing localized, culturally specific and sensitive support to at-risk groups seeking refuge. These organizations have been operating at max capacity during the lead-up and throughout the 2022 Russian attack on Ukraine. They have also provided useful insights and recommendations for shaping international humanitarian and military assistance based on their knowledge of the conflict.
While humanitarian assistance efforts employ a variety of models and mechanisms for engaging local civil society, it can be understandably more challenging for military actors to ensure these insights and recommendations are considered as part of military assistance and planned operations. International and national organizations like CARE International, the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund, and the Ukrainian Women’s Fund are often helpful starting points for military actors to understand the local civil society landscape given their local networks. Some of these larger organizations also have security sector liaisons specifically dedicated to improving coordination with military and other security actors. International and national level organizations are helpful conduits for distinguishing between local organizations that are amenable to working with the military and those who do not want any real or perceived affiliation. This is an optimal way for military forces to take stock of the civil society landscape without overtaxing the local network with information requirements.
Importantly, women’s civil society organizations in Ukraine are facing their own unique challenges as a result of the war: supply chain delays, insufficient resources and capacity to meet demand, and limited access to coordination mechanisms and decision-making processes led by international actors, among others. As nonhumanitarian actors with a different mission, allied militaries may never fully map these interconnected, localized networks, yet may be operating in and around them in the same environment. It is paramount that allied militaries take steps to understand how the local network operates so that military action does not negatively impact their efforts. The key takeaway for military operators is not to replace or upend the system built and implemented by these networks, but to ensure it is sustained, continues operating, and remains informed about planned military action through appropriate intermediaries.
Recommendations
Military assistance for Ukraine has involved radar and anti-armor systems, ammunition, vehicles, and aircraft to support Ukraine’s defense of its sovereign territory. In the weeks following the Russian invasion, NATO allies bolstered allied force posture by deploying air defense, armor, and infantry forces, among other capabilities, along NATO’s eastern flank. Interestingly, no reporting describes how this support is necessary for countering the gendered impacts of Russia’s hybrid warfare, addressing instances of CRSV, understanding women as warfighters in Ukraine, or sustaining the critical role of localized civil society networks. Yet these are some of the many human security dynamics that will shape the outcomes in Ukraine and, importantly, contextualize the battlespace Ukraine’s military is currently operating in and allied militaries are observing from their deterrence posture. The recommendations below seek to help allied militaries accommodate gendered human security challenges within the context of the support they are providing for the defense of Ukraine; they are not all encompassing and should be reevaluated as the conflict evolves and new information becomes available. Notably, the tactical recommendations should not be considered the primary course of action: they represent a minimum viable capability to enable action and prevent inaction.
Tactical
1. Incorporate human security guidance into commanders’ intent.
2. Develop and provide specialized training for deployed forces.
3. Balance threat and civilian intelligence assessments.
Operational
4. Provide gender-specific healthcare and equipment.
5. Counter gender disinformation.
6. Deploy civil-military cooperation capabilities.
7. Diversify force composition for deployed CIMIC teams.
Strategic
8. Bolster NATO’s internal gender and human security capacity.
9. Advocate for women’s participation in peace negotiations.
10. Elevate the protection of civilians in bilateral defense talks with Ukraine.
Conclusion
The NATO Strategic Concept acknowledges the important relationship of national-level decision-making to the collective security of the Alliance and Euro-Atlantic region. Right now, allies are making individual decisions to defend Ukraine because it is in the interests of European security and the collective values that bond allies together. Allied military assistance to support Ukraine’s defense of its territorial integrity is remarkable; so, too, is the ability to rapidly mobilize deterrent forces in Europe. But the security and sovereignty of Ukraine is also contingent upon the human security of Ukrainians living within its borders. Beyond the policy documents and international mandates, allied militaries have an operational responsibility to mitigate the potential impacts of military assistance and operations on civilians. They already have access to information and capabilities that enable the integration of human security considerations into military decision-making. Now allied militaries need to take the next steps to put these considerations into action for the future of Ukraine and European security.
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