Despite the popularity of the “Canada-as-peacekeeper” image with the Canadian public, Canada’s military long had problems with it, feeling that it “emasculated” Canadian soldiers and therefore the country itself.
gender
The overly simplistic understanding of gender in Nigeria’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), along with the government’s failure to prioritize human rights in its security policy, together result in “gendered security harms."
Rural villagers understood girls’ access to education and women’s economic opportunities outside the home as indicators of everyday peace.
“Violent extremism” must be reconsidered from the standpoint of local women, rather than from a “narrow, Western-centric, and male-dominated” perspective—a move that reveals, in the context of Iraq and Syria, the inclusion under that label of violence attributed not only to Salafi-Jihadist groups but also to government forces, “government-affiliated militias,” and patriarchy.
In Afghanistan, some women from “liberal democracies” report experiencing a “third gender”—whereby, if they act as equals to their male counterparts, they “are masculinized, and not real women but something else,” providing them with a measure of freedom and access in this context.
Women comprised less than a quarter of the Afghan religious peacebuilders network examined, and most of them were engaged in peacebuilding work focused on education, including teaching peace and conflict resolution from an Islamic perspective or raising awareness in their spheres of influence about what Islamic sacred texts say about peace.
A list experiment is an effective research method for uncovering sensitive information, as its use suggests that sexual violence was much more prevalent during the Sri Lankan civil war (affecting about 13.4% of the population) than direct questioning would indicate (at 1.4% of the population).
Certain gendered myths—like the “gentleman soldier” and “women as peacebuilders”—were used by the Rwandan Defense Forces to re-assert traditional gender roles.
Nearly all nonviolent resistance movements face a common challenge—the temptation to turn to violence, whether among those within the movement or on the part of the government whose policies or behaviors may be the target of the resistance movement.
When governments are less corrupt and have high levels of women’s participation, they are better able to promote and support peacebuilding.