The Australian Foreign Policy White Paper, gender and conflict prevention: ties that don’t bind

ABSTRACT

After a 14-year gap, Australia’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper advanced a ‘comprehensive framework to advance Australia’s security and prosperity in a contested and competitive world’ (Australian Government 2017a, “2017 Foreign Policy White Paper.” https://www.fpwhitepaper.gov.au/., v). Focused on regional stability, partnerships and global cooperation, it identifies ‘risks and opportunities’ in an altered external environment. In this article, we argue that the neglect of gender and conflict prevention in the White Paper has implications for its stated aspirations with regard to peace and security. This is striking considering the attention that gender—particularly in the context of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda—has received in other policy areas and documents. Building on feminist security scholarship, conflict prevention approaches, and bringing in civil society voices, we argue that the White Paper contains a gendered, masculinist logic, separating domestic and international issues and paying insufficient attention to the structural and systemic causes of conflict. This article pursues a gender analysis in order to illuminate the gaps present in the White Paper and its limited vision of security and makes the case that conflict prevention from a gender perspective is key to sustainable peace, security and national interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict prevention
• Foreign Policy White Paper
• Australia
• gender
• foreign policy
• women
• peace and security (WPS)

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful and constructive feedback, as well as the editorial team for guidance. We would also like to thank the participants at the Women in Security Studies workshop at Griffith University in 2019 who provided invaluable feedback to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Dr Christine Agius is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research interests include critical security studies, gender, bordering practices, identity, and Nordic politics. Publications include The Social Construction of Swedish Neutrality: Challenges to Swedish Identity and Sovereignty (2006, Manchester University Press), The Politics of Identity: Space, Place and Discourse (edited with Dean Keep, Manchester University Press, 2018), The Persistence of Global Masculinism: Discourse, Gender and Neo-Colonial Re-Articulations of Violence (with Lucy Nicholas, Palgrave, 2018) and articles in Cooperation and Conflict, Security Dialogue, Political Geography, and other journals.

Dr Anu Mundkur is an Adjunct Lecturer and co-founded the Gender Consortium at Flinders University. She currently works for CARE Australia as the Head of Gender Equality and Social Inclusion. Prior to this role she was at the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID), an umbrella organisation with 133 NGOs as members. Anu served as ACFID’s secondee to the Australian Civil-Military Centre (ACMC), advising the military, police and DFAT on women peace and security issues, humanitarian crisis and disaster response. Anu has worked for over 17 years in the field of gender and development, including nearly 10 years working, in different roles, on gender projects funded by Australia Aid in the Indo-Pacific region. Anu is also an active applied policy researcher whose areas of expertise include WPS, women's representation, participation and leadership in politics. In 2016 she served as one of two NGO representatives on the Australian Government Delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (60th Session).

Notes

1 To implement UN Security Council resolutions on WPS, member states were encouraged to develop NAPs. Australia’s first NAP was released in 2012 and the second NAP is currently being drafted.

2 One example is Australia’s 2016 Defence White Paper, which, while limited in terms of making gender a consistent focus, mentions the participation of women in defence and defence leadership positions, drawing on one pillar of the WPS agenda (Australian Government 2016).

3 The evolving database of NAPs covers 91 countries, some with more than one NAP. At the time of writing, of these 91 countries, 9 NAPs were unavailable (for Cyprus, Bulgaria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Latvia, Malta, Sri Lanka, South African and Uruguay). NAPs from Nepal and Namibia were listed but were yet to be analysed. The database did not include the 2019 NAPs from Lebanon and Bangladesh. The database methodology also counts ‘prevention’ in terms of its appearance in the NAP document, so further examination would be needed to determine if prevention is related specifically to ‘conflict’ or other categories, such as sexual and gender-based violence.

4 Trojanowska (2019) takes a more critical view of implementation of WPS across different government departments, arguing that the Defence White Paper was also a ‘missed opportunity’ to connect the international and national implementation of the NAP and suffered important gaps.

5 These examples also suggest that Australia’s actions ‘direct’ foreign policy reality both domestically and in the region. As feminist scholars have pointed out, diverse voices can be subsumed by dominant voices both within feminist scholarship and activism. (D’Costa and Lee-Koo 2013). See also Parpart and Parashar (2018) on complex questions of silence, voice and agency which speak to and challenge these points.

6 This is especially important in light of critiques that suggest the inclusion of Indigenous women’s voices was a neglected aspect of the first NAP and that WPS should also be a domestic issue (Dunn 2014; Basu and Shepherd 2017; Mundkur, Agius, and Ceccon 2018).