Bridging the gap: Early warning,gender and the responsibility to protect

Abstract

Women, Peace and Security (WPS) scholars and practitioners have expressed reservations about the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle because of its popular use as a synonym for armed humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, R2P’s early failure to engage with and advance WPS efforts such as United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1325 (2000) has seen the perpetuation of limited roles ascribed to women in implementing the R2P principle. As a result, there has been a knowledge and practice gap between the R2P and WPS agendas, despite the fact that their advocates share common goals in relation to the prevention of atrocities and protection of populations. In this article we propose to examine just one of the potential avenues for aligning the WPS agenda and R2P principle in a way that is beneficial to both and strengthens the pursuit of a shared goal – prevention. We argue that the development and inclusion of gender-specific indicators – particularly economic, social and political discriminatory practices against women – has the potential to improve the capacity of early warning frameworks to forecast future mass atrocities.

Keywords

Early warning gender prevention R2P

In 2005, the United Nations (UN) World Summit adopted the concept of the responsibility to protect (R2P) in paragraphs 138–140 of its outcome document (UN, 2005: paras.138–140). R2P’s roots lay in the repeated failure of the international community to prevent or halt genocides in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda during the 1990s (Ban, 2010a: para.4). Informed by the earlier 2001 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s In Larger Freedom report (2005) (Annan, 2005; ICISS, 2001), Member States formally accepted their enduring responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. They also agreed that the international community should assist states to this end and that when states failed to protect their populations the international community had a responsibility to take ‘timely and decisive action’ to protect populations until the sovereign state is able and willing to do so (UN, 2005). Notably, the commitment of states and the international community to R2P included a specific commitment to prevent these four crimes.

A notable, but often overlooked, consequence of the delineation of R2P in relation to the four crimes is that UN Member States effectively recognized that ‘sexual and gender-based violence is as worthy of international attention as other forms of violence’ (Bond and Sherret, 2012: 144). It could be argued, of course, that sexual and gender-based violence had little need for such political elevation; a series of United Nations Security Council Resolutions has linked women’s peace and security (WPS) to international peace and security since the landmark Resolution 1325 (2000) (S/Res/1325, 31 October 2000).¹ However, we argue that the inclusion of widespread and systematic sexual and gender based violence (SGBV) as acts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide (ICC, 2014: 10–16), requires that knowledge focused on the prevention of these crimes be mainstreamed into R2P’s prevention agenda, which requires deeper engagement in the shared prevention focus of the R2P and WPS agenda.

To date, as Bond and Sherret (2012: 141) note, there has been a failure to connect the R2P and WPS agendas. Many WPS scholars and practitioners are cautious about the R2P principle because of its popular expression as a synonym for armed humanitarian intervention and the lack of gender inclusivity in the original formulation of R2P under ICISS (Charlesworth, 2010; Shepherd, 2012). As a result, WPS advocates in the field have been wary of R2P. In response, the UN Secretary-General has repeatedly explained that the popular representation of R2P as a contemporary euphemism for humanitarian intervention is inconsistent with what was agreed in 2005 and the UN’s implementation strategy (Ban, 2009: para.10a; also Ban, 2010a, 2011b, 2012b). On the other hand, R2P’s failure to consistently engage with the protection and prevention agenda outlined within the WPS agenda (with exception of Ban, 2009, 2013a) may also account for some of the caution of WPS advocates concerning R2P.

The failure to substantively connect the two agendas has prompted criticisms that R2P has failed to incorporate a gender perspective, and, in particular, the requirements of the WPS prevention, protection and participation agenda, as laid out in Resolution 1325 (2000) (Stamnes, 2012: 176–177). Similarly, concerns have been expressed about the need to expand the gender-focused protection and participation aspects of Resolution 1325 (2000) beyond the WPS community, in order to engage all actors and early warning mechanisms throughout the UN system (Skjelsbæk, 2012: 162). Gaps and misperceptions have limited the exchange of knowledge between academics, policy-makers and practitioners working in these two areas, despite the fact that they share common goals in relation to the prevention of mass atrocities and the protection of populations (George, 2013). In this article we examine one potential avenue for connecting WPS and R2P: the shared pursuit of preventing mass atrocities in the first place through the development of gender-specific indicators in early warning frameworks to predict countries at risk of genocide and mass atrocities (Bond and Sherret, 2012: 144). Like others, we are concerned that women-focused economic, social and political indicators remain relatively untested as factors that may inform conflict prevention and, of special interest to us, prevent mass atrocities (Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez, 2002; UN Women, 2014; Von Joeden-Forgey, 2012). ² Our focus on female indicators does not mean that we exclude the existence of sexual and gendered violence that targets both men and women in fact, quite the opposition, our focus is informed by earlier studies connecting gender norms (masculine/feminine social, economic and political roles) within a given society to women’s access to social, economic and political resources, and the occurrence of mass atrocities (Cardona et al., 2012; Skjelsbæk, 2012).

In this article we argue for integration of gender-specific indicators into early warning frameworks for prevention of genocide and mass atrocities (which, in essence, indicates those countries at risk of failing to uphold their responsibility to protect) for two reasons. First, if the best predictor of a country’s peacefulness is its level of violence against women, there should be efforts to analyze how women’s status in society relates to violence and, more generally, to the risk of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity (Hudson et al., 2012). In particular, the inclusion of information about women’s human rights and violence against women into existing early warning frameworks should improve their capacity to predict not only widespread or systematic SGBV but also other atrocity crimes (Palermo and Peterman, 2011; von Joeden-Forgey, 2012). We argue that the WPS and R2P agendas can contribute to this goal, even more so when they align their focus on the value of gender-specific early warning.

Second, scholars have yet to consider the extent to which gender-specific indicators may be useful for predicting the R2P crimes (Davies and Teitt, 2012). Currently, there is little evidence to support or reject the inclusion of gender-specific indicators to improve early warning of the R2P crimes in general, and widespread and systematic sexual violence more specifically. What is certain is that this lack of systemic analysis has contributed to an inconsistent – essentially ad hoc – approach to prevention of SGBV crimes, and understanding of their relationship to other mass atrocity crimes (Ban, 2011a; Palermo and Peterman, 2011; Security Council Report, 2012). This article seeks to begin this journey of understanding the contribution of a gendered analysis in early warning frameworks to prevent mass atrocities, first by looking at the relationship between gender inequality and situations where sexual and gender based atrocities have occurred in 2012 and 2013 period.

The article proceeds in three parts. First, we briefly chart the mass atrocity crimes listed under the R2P principle to examine how and where alignment with WPS may be valuable. We highlight one such area, the mandated requirement for the UN Secretary-General to present annual reports on situations of widespread and systematic sexual violence to the Security Council (Ban, 2011a, 2012a; S/Res/2106, 24 June 2013). In the second part of the article, we consider the added value of incorporating gender-specific indicators to predict those countries where the risk of such atrocities is high. We compare one suggested gender-focused early warning framework that relies on open source data (Hill, 2003; Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez, 2002) against two highly respected genocide and mass atrocities risk profiles – Gregory Stanton’s Genocide Watch and Barbara Harff’s Genocide Prevention Network (hereafter referred to as the ‘Genocide Watch’ and ‘Genocide Prevention’ lists) (Genocide Watch, 2012; Harff, 2011; see Butcher et al., 2012). We consider the extent to which inclusion of gender-specific indicators alters these general early warning lists. In the third, and final, part of the article we discuss our key findings. We find that gender-specific indicators, especially those relating to women’s experience of social, economic and political inequality, are underutilized in early warning frameworks for genocide and mass atrocities. We argue that the UN Secretary-General annual reports on situations of widespread and systematic sexual violence are an opportunity to promote the dual WPS-R2P ambition of preventing such crimes through advocating national and regional responsibility to address structural gender inequality and gender-based human rights violations at national, regional and international levels.

Women, peace and security and the responsibility to protect

At the 2005 World Summit of the United Nations General Assembly, under the R2P principle, states agreed never to commit four crimes: war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide. These crimes are commonly understood to reference the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, and the 1998 Rome Statute, which provides the legal foundations for the International Criminal Court (ICC), operational since 2002 (O’Brien, 2012). As such, the 2005 summit document introduced clear parameters for the scope of R2P and the crimes to be prevented in order to protect civilians (Bellamy, 2009: 75). As noted above, one of the consequences of the delineation of R2P in relation to these four crimes is that UN Member States have effectively recognized that ‘sexual and gender-based violence is as worthy of international attention as other forms of violence’ (Bond and Sherret, 2012: 144). This requires attention to detail on the preventative measures states must adopt to meet their responsibility to prevent these crimes, as well as to address how the international community may assist states with this obligation. As noted in the UN Secretary-General’s fifth report on R2P, prevention requires addressing the relationship between gender inequality and atrocity crimes, specifically SGBV crimes (Ban, 2013a: 7–8). This statement provides a political opportunity to outline a mutually reinforcing prevention agenda, by advocates of both R2P and WPS.

As noted already in the introduction, one of the main sources of tension between the R2P and WPS agendas has been the prevailing view that R2P advocates are primarily concerned with armed humanitarian intervention (Charlesworth, 2010). In this vein, some scholars have suggested that R2P reduces women to being victims that must wait to be ‘saved’ by armed (male) humanitarians and is thereby complicit in the risks faced by women by ignoring their agency and empowerment (Stamnes, 2012). The focus on an R2P and WPS shared agenda that focuses on widespread and systematic SGBV potentially reinforces this concern. Such concerns about R2P limiting the work and focus of other themes are not unique to the WPS agenda. They have been echoed, for instance, in relation to R2P’s equally problematic relationship to the protection of civilians agenda (Strauss, 2009: 48). However, as with its relationship with the protection of civilians, we suggest that R2P should serve as a mutually enforcing mechanism for these existing norms rather than challenge or undermine their existence.

When it comes to the inclusion of WPS, the version of R2P that was adopted by Member States in 2005 is significantly more open to the prevention agenda promoted by WPS than its earlier definitions. The 2001 ICISS report argued that sexual violence was worthy of international attention only when it was used for ethnic cleansing (ICISS, 2001: xii, 15, 32), while the World Summit’s delineation of four crimes as being the subject matter of R2P allowed widespread and systematic SGBV to be considered an ‘R2P problem’ in its own right (i.e. not contingent on the crime being an act of ethnic cleansing). What is more, R2P calls upon Member States to fulfill their legal obligations with respect to protecting populations from these crimes and demands that they receive international attention comparable to other forms of violence proscribed by the relevant laws. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, among others, has sought to counter the one-dimensional view of R2P and argues that the implementation strategy of R2P prioritizes prevention and early warning to prevent and de-escalate crises – a pillar of prevention much in common with pillar of prevention articulated in Resolution 1325 (2000) (Ban, 2009; Luck, 2009: 18). In his first R2P report, the Secretary-General referred to the responsibility of sovereign states to prevent mass atrocities, including sexual violence, by fulfilling their individual obligations to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000), Resolution 1612 (2005) and Resolution 1820 (2009) (Ban, 2009: para.34). In his 2010 report on R2P and early warning, the UN Secretary-General said that there was a gap in the process of accumulating and accessing data relating to the early warning indicators for conflict that specifically highlighted the risk of R2P crimes (Ban, 2010a: para.10[b]). The Secretary-General noted that R2P crimes do not occur only within contexts of armed conflict and, furthermore, these crimes were to be understood and recognised as possibly having different preconditions to generalized armed conflict. Though the linkage was not made in that particular year (further to publication of the 2009 R2P report, the first WPS reference was in 2013, see Ban, 2013a), this argument was quite similar to one being presented by the Secretary-General in the same year concerning the need for greater emphasis on prevention in the WPS agenda, specifically, the prevention of widespread and systematic SGBV.

In WPS Resolution 1960 (2010), the Security Council called for improved data collection specific to the risk of SGBV. The Secretary-General was called upon to identify, in his annual report pursuant to Resolution 1820 (2008), those parties engaged in conflict suspected of conducting acts of systematic sexual violence. In a departure from this reporting duty first outlined in Resolution 1820 (2008) and Resolution 1888 (2009), Resolution 1960 (2010) suggested the Security Council use the Secretary-General’s annual report on situations of sexual violence in armed conflict as a means by which the Council would become more actively engaged in action to prevent these crimes (Security Council Report, 2012: 15–16). The Security Council called upon the Secretary-General to develop criteria for listing and de-listing parties suspected of proscribed activities. Up to this point, the Security Council approach taken towards reporting situations of sexual violence in armed conflict had been a less streamlined process up to this point (O’Gorman, 2013: 39). The UN Action Against Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict is a network of 14 UN entities (Focal Point appointed to UN Action by each agency). Set up in 2007 in New York and Chaired by the UN Secretary General Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, UN Action is to promote ownership and accountability for action on CRSV throughout the UN system (Security Council to country level missions). UN Action largely draws on information from gender advisors in peacekeeping operations, advice from UN Country Teams and the Secretary-General’s Special Representatives, the documentation and reporting of such crimes in individual country reports, the International Criminal Court, Human Rights Council, or Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and other ad hoc sources (O’Gorman, 2013). There has been discussion about discrepancy in data provision and a lack of transparency in the methods used to list and de-list situations of concern, as well as an absence of clarity about how the UN system will address situations where the potential listing of government forces may cause political problems for peacekeeping missions or Country Teams requiring the cooperation of the same government. Nonetheless, the naming and shaming of such actors under Resolution 1960 (2010) has been an attempt to end the culture of impunity, (re)prioritise the protection of civilians from these crimes, and to improve the Council’s response to escalations by mobilizing and refining ongoing analysis both in the field and in New York (Security Council Report, 2012: 16).

Of note, one of the principal reasons identified by the Security Council for the lack of progress on the prevention of SGBV, noted in Resolution 1960 (2010), has been the failure of Member States and UN offices to ‘cooperatively engage with…actors, national institutions, civil society organizations, health-care service providers, and women’s groups to enhance data collection and analysis of incidents, trends, and patterns of rape and other forms of sexual violence to assist the Council’s consideration of appropriate actions, including targeted and graduated measures’ (S/Res/1960: para.8).

Accordingly, the Secretary-General was charged with establishing a ‘monitoring, analysis and reporting arrangement’ (MARA) to ‘name and shame’ perpetrators, as well as to prevent the escalation of conflict-related sexual violence by reporting on situations of ‘armed conflict, post-conflict and other situations of relevance’ with regard to the implementation of Resolution 1820 (2008) and 1888 (2009). Furthermore, Resolution 1960 (2010) called for the broadening to include specific gender indicators that could facilitate early warning for the prevention of these atrocities, in turn calling upon Member States to improve their data collection and analysis in these areas.

UN Action were instructed to develop MARA to enhance their reporting mechanism on sexual violence in conflict (O’Gorman, 2013). In turn, enhanced reporting under MARA to the Security Council is intended inform and guide the actions of the Council to prevent, halt and prosecute such crimes (Ban, 2011a: paras.60–63). As noted above, fulfillment of this framework requires Member States to provide data in relation to gender-specific indicators, including specific acts of violence against women, implementation of international human rights law pertaining to gender equality, economic and social indicators for women, and UN specific indicators (i.e. women in peacekeeping missions) (Ban, 2010b: Annex). These indicators are intended to guide the development of a prevention framework that will inform the UN system, and specifically the Secretary- General Secretariat, on gender-focused risk analysis for the prevention of widespread and systematic SGBV. The UN has set the target of ensuring that half of its early warning systems (those tasked with responding to escalating events, i.e. the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – UNHCR, the United Nations Department of Political Affairs and Office for Humanitarian Affairs –OCHA) include gender-specific indicators by 2014, with gender-specific indicators being included as standard across all the system’s early warning analysis by 2020 (Ban, 2011a: Annex). During this time, however, it appears there has been no discussion or even recognition of the shared interests in prevention and early warning between UN Action, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee on WPS and the Office for the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect (The International Coalition for The Responsibility to Protect, 2013). This lack of engagement is problematic for the R2P agenda in light of repeated recommendations that there is a need to deepen the agenda’s understanding of gender-specific responses and recommendations to prevent mass atrocity crimes (Skjelsbæk, 2012: 154–171).

To date, there have been two references in the five UN Secretary-General reports on R2P (Ban, 2009, 2013a) to the need to direct more attention and research to record best practices in the alleviation of gender inequality and the promotion of gender empowerment to prevent mass atrocities, including SGBV crimes. However, beyond these suggestions there has been little direction on how to start building such knowledge. Widespread and systematic SGBV is increasingly identified as a product of war (Taylor, 2013), but the specific preconditions for SGBV and reasons why it is prevalent in some armed conflicts but not others remain disputed (Cohen, 2013; Farr, 2009). As we discuss below, the difficulties in collecting gender sensitive data (and the limited understanding of gender sensitive data) has led to their exclusion from early warning frameworks. Thus the relationship between SGBV and mass atrocities, irrespective of the presence of conflict, is discussed but not presented as fact in these frameworks.

In this section we have identified a particularly strong overlap between R2P and WPS to improve early warning assessments to prevent atrocities. However, as the recent UN Secretary-General reports on sexual violence in armed conflict situations suggest, serious questions remain regarding the collection and interpretation of the relevant data. Despite a shared interest in early warning frameworks and prevention toolkits to prevent mass atrocities, there has been little detail provided on how R2P and WPS could align their shared concerns to start generating the knowledge required to build political momentum towards prevention and early warning. The first step is to evaluate the added value of including gender inequality in frameworks for predicting mass atrocities (Ban, 2013b: 7–8), and it is this question that we turn to in the second part of the article.

Gender-specific indicators and early warning

In 2002, Suzanne Schmeidl and Eugenia Piza-Lopez noted that there were few, if any, early warning systems for conflict prediction, let alone genocide, that incorporated gender-specific indicators (Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez, 2002: 8). In recent years this critique continues but little has changed (Bond and Sherret, 2012; von Joeden-Forgey, 2012). Existing frameworks referred to for predicting mass atrocities and genocide do not refer to SGBV or gendered indicators in their frameworks or policy planning (Albright and Cohen, 2008; Butcher et al., 2012; Harff, 2003; Stanton, 2004; Woocher, 2006). Despite the fact that legal developments in relation to genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity refer to gender-specific crimes – such as mass rape, forced sterilization and abortions, forced impregnation and forced marriage – two of the most highly sourced and respected annual risk analyses, those produced by Barbara Harff’s Genocide Prevention Advisory Network and Gregory Stanton’s Genocide Watch do not analyse gender-specific indicators (Butcher et al., 2012: 12).³ Nor does it appear that there has been consideration of whether a focus on such indicators or prior existence of gender-based human rights violations in a country may affect a country’s predisposition towards genocide and mass atrocities.

One potential reason for the ‘gender silence’ in early warning analysis for mass atrocities may be that to date the primary focus has been on defining what is to be ‘tested’ in these frameworks – ethnic and minorities versus the political-socio-economic targeting – and what modeling provides best predictive capacity (Ulfelder, 2011). It seems that the gendered context and influences that informs who of the targeted groups is targeted for these crimes is not of consequence. In addition, the concept of an early warning framework is still relatively new. Regarding early warning for widespread and systematic sexual violence, Secretary-General Kofi Annan came close to explicitly calling for such a framework in his 2006 violence against women report when he called on the Security Council to address ‘the responsibility of the State to address violence against women’, and recommended that:

‘The Security Council intensify efforts to address gender-based violence against women and consistently monitor measures taken within the framework of the implementation of Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) on women and peace and security. Towards this end, the Security Council should consider establishing a dedicated monitoring mechanism to increase the effectiveness of the Council’s contribution to preventing and redressing violence against women in armed conflict.’ (Annan, 2006: para. 397)

However, it was not until Resolution 1960 (2010) that the Security Council identified the need to receive reports from the Secretary-General on situations of risk for widespread and systematic sexual violence; and have that reporting procedure linked to an early warning system (MARA). Even now, the focus has been only on monitoring known perpetrators with the aim of preventing them from committing further acts of sexual violence. Thus the tension with the ‘early warning’ focus of MARA is on escalating acts of sexual violence and the perpetrators, rather than hear situations where structural conditions may give rise to such acts (i.e. an early warning framework that focuses on intervening variables that may prevent as well as predict, Security Council Report, 2013).

Another potential explanation for the silence could be that the need for gender-focused early warning has received only sporadic interest from the Security Council and that this interest has been limited to its thematic agenda on WPS, particularly conflict-related sexual violence. In other words, there has been little cross-fertilization of WPS into other Security Council themes, missions and agendas (Aroussi, 2011). This is particularly highlighted in discussions about sexual violence in the Security Council where there has been active political opposition to discussions of widespread and systematic sexual violence in conflicts that are not already on the agenda of the Security Council, despite precedents in other thematic areas, specifically in discussions of Children in Armed Conflict (Security Council Report, 2012: 5).

An examination of the Security Council’s progress on WPS since Resolution 1325 (2000), conducted by the NGO Security Council Report, revealed key failings ‘in terms of the continuing development of the Council’s response to sexual violence’: the lack of ‘reporting consistency between different country-specific situations’ and failure to implement ongoing monitoring, analysis and reporting arrangements on conflict-related sexual violence.’ In other words, the relationship between political violence and sexual violence has not been understood as linked – this is a failure in early warning to prevent these crimes (Security Council Report, 2012: 2). More careful thinking and analysis of gender-specific root causes may highlight where mass atrocities, including widespread and/or systematic SGBV, are likely to occur in situations of conflict, post-conflict and civil unrest (Ban, 2012a: paras.1–4; UN Women, 2014). This requires R2P and WPS advocates seeking each other out to outline a shared prevention focus.

Early warning and SGBV

In light of the discussion above, this section explores the opportunities and challenges in relation to inclusion of gender inequality in early warning frameworks for genocide and mass atrocities. Arguments for early warning frameworks to include gender-specific indicators have been raised by UN Women as recently as 2014 (UN Women, 2014). As mentioned above, Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez (2002), in the landmark exploratory study in the field, examined the potential for gender-specific indicators to inform assessment of the underlying risk of genocide and mass atrocities (root cause indicators, i.e. political participation of women) in addition to developing their own framework for understanding the escalation of risk (precipitating indicators, i.e. high volume of female refugees fleeing conflict). A series of UNIFEM-led studies used this model to explore the utility of local information-gathering for early warning about escalating violence (i.e. identifying SGBV early to prevent it from becoming widespread and systematic) (Mosser, 2007). This study interweaved generalized forms of violence against women (i.e. rates of domestic violence) with instances of organized violence against groups of women (i.e. armed groups attacking villages and mass rape).

In the rest of this section, we explore how contemporary application of these earlier studies relates to existing early warning frameworks for mass atrocities (R2P crimes). We compare the earlier mentioned and respected early warning risk lists – Genocide Watch and Genocide Prevention Network – and compare their 2012 risk lists against a 2012 risk list developed from gender-specific indicators suggested by Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez (2002) (see Figure 1) as (equally) capable of identifying the risk of mass atrocities (see Tables 1 to 3).

Figure 1.

Root causes for genocide early warning – gendered indicators.

Table 1.

2012 lists on early warning, gender inequality and mass atrocities.

Genocide Watch*	Genocide Prevention*	GII** #	SIGI 2012*** #	UNSC 2012
Congo, DR	Myanmar	Yemen	Mali	Afghanistan (c)
Sudan⁴	Syria	Chad	Sudan	Colombia (c)
Syria	PR China	Niger	Congo, DR	Cote D’Ivoire (c)
Somalia	Sudan	Mali	Yemen	Libya (c)
Afghanistan	Pakistan	Congo, DR	Somalia	Myanmar (c)
Pakistan	Ethiopia	Afghanistan	Benin	Somalia (c)
North Korea	Zimbabwe	Papua New Guinea	Chad	South Sudan (c)
Myanmar	Rwanda	Liberia	Nigeria	Darfur, Sudan (c)
Ethiopia	Iran	Cen. African Rep.	Guinea	Central African Rep (pc)^
Nigeria	Congo, DR	Sierra Leone	Gabon	Chad (pc)
Libya	Somalia	Côte d’Ivoire	Gambia	Iraq (pc)
Yemen	Saudi Arabia	Saudi Arabia	Syria	Nepal (pc)
PR China	Sri Lanka	Cameroon	Swaziland	Sri Lanka (pc)
Colombia	Nigeria	Benin	Uganda	Bosnia-Herz. (pc)
Equatorial Guinea	Cameroon	Congo	Niger	Liberia (pc)
Republic Congo	Central African Rep.	Zambia	Cameroon	Sierra Leone (pc)
Chad	Uganda	Kenya	Burkina Faso	Timor Leste (pc)
Central African Republic	North Korea	India	Afghanistan	Egypt (u)
Haiti	Guatemala	Sudan	Azerbaijan	Guinea (u)
Guinea-Bissau	Uzbekistan	Gambia	Togo	Kenya (u)
Iraq		Mauritania	Sierra Leone	Syria (u)^
Iran		Mozambique	Egypt	Angola (u)
Uzbekistan		Togo	Ethiopia
Egypt		Haiti	Bangladesh
Cote D’Ivoire		Ghana	Liberia
Rwanda		Burkina Faso	Core D’Ivoire
Burundi		Malawi	Georgia
Zimbabwe		Tanzania	Iraq
South Africa		Zimbabwe	Zambia
Angola		Iraq	Uzbekistan
Mali		Uganda	India
Algeria		Pakistan	Pakistan
Philippines		Senegal	Armenia
Lebanon		Nepal	Sri Lanka
Israel		Bangladesh	Albania
Sri Lanka		Qatar	Burundi
India		Swaziland	Ghana
Indonesia		Guatemala	Lao PDR
Russia		Lesotho	Mauritania
Kosovo		Lao PDR	Tanzania
Bosnia-Herzegovina		Guyana	Kenya
Belarus		Honduras	Guinea-Bissau
Venezuela		Morocco	Myanmar
Bahrain		Gabon
Bahrain		Botswana
		Nicaragua
		Indonesia
		Cambodia
		Bhutan
		Belize
		Myanmar
		Panama

Most likely to least: Genocide Watch range – darkest grey is current massacres; dark grey is potential massacres and grey is polarization.

GII range starts at highest inequality to just above world average 0.049 or 49% – Panama is 0.0495; darkest grey is 70% range; dark grey is 60% range; grey is 50% range; and light grey is 40% range.

***

SIGI range starts from highest value (out of 0-1) and stops above median – Myanmar at 0.245.

UN categories - c – conflict zone; pc – post conflict; u – unrest (civil) and electoral unrest. Angola case is perhaps most unique – risk is assigned to Congolese women refugees. It should be noted that for situations such as Syria and Central African Republic, the UN conflict categories were assigned at the time of the report (early 2012).

Following list are countries mentioned in UNSC but no equality data is not provided:

GII: Angola, Bosnia Herzegovina, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia

SIGI: Angola, Central African Republic, Congo(Republic), Croatia, Libya, Timor-Leste

Table 2.

2012 short list early warning, gender inequality and mass atrocities.

Genocide Watch*	Genocide Prevention*	GII**#	SIGI 2012***#	UNSC2012
Congo, DR	Myanmar	Yemen	Mali	Afghanistan (c)
Sudan	Syria	Chad	Sudan	Colombia (c)
Syria	PR China	Niger	Congo, DR	Cote D’Ivoire (c)
Somalia	Sudan	Mali	Yemen	Libya (c)
Afghanistan	Pakistan	Congo, DR	Somalia	Myanmar (c)
Pakistan	Ethiopia	Afghanistan	Benin	Somalia (c)
North Korea	Zimbabwe	Papua New Guinea	Chad	South Sudan (c)
Myanmar	Rwanda	Liberia	Nigeria	Darfur, Sudan (c)
Ethiopia	Iran	Central African Republic	Guinea	Central AR (pc)
Nigeria	Congo, DR	Sierra Leone	Gabon	Chad (pc)
Libya	Somalia	Côte d’Ivoire	Gambia	Iraq (pc)
Yemen	Saudi Arabia	Saudi Arabia	Syria	Nepal (pc)
PR China	Sri Lanka	Cameroon	Swaziland	Sri Lanka (pc)
Colombia	Nigeria	Benin	Uganda	Bosnia-Herz. (pc)
Equatorial Guinea	Cameroon	Congo	Niger	Liberia (pc)
Republic Congo	Central African Republic	Zambia	Cameroon	Sierra Leone (pc)
Chad	Uganda	Kenya	Burkina Faso	Timor Leste (pc)
Central African Rep.	North Korea	India	Afghanistan	Egypt (u)
Haiti	Guatemala	Sudan	Azerbaijan	Guinea (u)
Guinea-Bissau	Uzbekistan	Gambia	Togo	Kenya (u)
Iraq		Mauritania	Sierra Leone	Syria (u)
Iran		Mozambique	Egypt	Angola (u)

Most likely to least.

GII range starts at highest inequality to just above world average 0.049 or 49%.

***

SIGI range starts from highest value (out of 0-1) and stops above median – Myanmar at 0.245.

Table 3.

Comparing high-risk situations.

UNSC 2012 List	Genocide Watch	Genocide Prevention	GII	SIGI
Afghanistan	Y	N	Y	Y
Colombia (c)	Y	N	N	N
Cote D’Ivoire (c)	Y	N	Y	N
Libya (c)	Y	N	N	N
Myanmar (c)	Y	Y	N	N
Somalia (c)	Y	Y	ND	Y
South Sudan (c)	__	__	__	__
Darfur, Sudan (c)	Y	Y	Y	Y
Central AR (pc)	Y	Y	Y	ND
Chad (pc)	Y	N	Y	Y
Iraq (pc)	Y	N	N	N
Nepal (pc)	N	N	N	N
Sri Lanka (pc)	Y	Y	N	N
Bosnia-Herz. (pc)	N	N	ND	N
Liberia (pc)	N	N	Y	N
Sierra Leone (pc)	N	N	Y	Y
Timor Leste (pc)	N	N	N	ND
Egypt (u)	N	N	ND	Y
Guinea (u)	N	N	ND	Y
Kenya (u)	N	N	Y	N
Syria (u)	Y	Y	N	Y
Angola (u)	N	N	ND	ND
Total/22	11	6	8	8

Before moving on to comparing the datasets, it is important to clarify some potential problems in the analysis. First, gender focused data collection is relatively new. The UNDP and the World Bank – primary sources of the data covered above – have only been collecting data with a ‘gender perspective’ in mind since early 1990s (i.e. 1994 for UNDP). This means that data collection still relies heavily on self-reported surveys from Member States (the primary source for data collection on domestic and sexual violence). Such data are unlikely to be fine-tuned to the gendered implications of data collection in countries with high levels of inequality in their political, judicial and security sectors. For example, significant grievances may not be recorded when women lack access to a formal legal system (Ni Aolain et al., 2011: 79). Second, there are methodological problems limiting the accuracy of data. For example, data on female infanticide rely on estimates, often from case studies which are then extrapolated countrywide. This may not take into account crucial social, economic and political differences across provinces within a territory. The final challenge is the reliance on data produced over different timeframes and the problem with data collection irregularities. For example, it is difficult to compare data on literacy rates with female attendance rates at primary or secondary school, because many states do not provide regular data on the latter. If such data are to be used for early warning purposes, they must be collected regularly and as accurately as possible (Hudson et al., 2012: 152–153).

The definition of violence offered by Secretary-General Annan in his landmark 2006 report (see above) focuses on the systematic inequality and lack of empowerment that legitimates violence against women in the home and in society, and the possible overlap of this violence with conflict-related sexual violence. Such ‘early’ early warning knowledge may be vital for understanding countries at risk of widespread and systematic SGBV but, equally, it may not be (our concern is that we do not know). We attempted to incorporate these relevant claims by using a ‘wider’ set of gender-specific indicators in addition to the more limited set of indicators suggested by Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez (2002).

Our starting point was to look at the countries deemed at high risk of mass atrocities (R2P crimes) by Genocide Prevention and Genocide Watch lists. We then compiled a set of gender-specific root cause indicators to generate a gendered ‘preconditions’ list based on the indicators identified by Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez (see Figure 1).

We soon encountered a number of problems in preparing data that replicated the Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez (2002: 9–11) framework. First, their suggested UNDP Gender Empowerment and Gender Development Index measures have evolved since 2011 into the Gender Inequality Indices (GII) in the UNDP annual report on human development indicators (HDI) (UNDP, 2011). It is difficult to find data for some of the economic indicators, such as wage inequality, for many of the countries identified as being at high-risk according to the Genocide Watch and Genocide Prevention lists. The GII comprises most of the substantive political, economic and social measures that Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez (Figure 1 above) recommend. But, additional economic data and information about female suffrage and Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) coverage are not included in the GII. We examined separately the relationship between GII rank, CEDAW adherence and female suffrage, as recommended by Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez (2002: 9–11). None of the (small number of) countries that have failed to ratify CEDAW correlated to countries with high GII scores (a high score for a country means their female citizens experience high levels of inequality). Likewise, given that female suffrage is now – in principle at least – nearly universal, except in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, there appeared to be little value in applying a suffrage indicator (i.e. Htun and Weldon, 2012). In other words, states that have signed to CEDAW but not ratified the instrument (Iran, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Tonga and US) are small in number. This, combined with the absence of female suffrage (only Qatar and Saudi Arabia), indicates that such limited gender-specific data will not provide strong early warning indicators of mass atrocities.

This restricted the socio-economic aspects of gender-specific indicators to the GII dataset (Klasen and Wink, 2003). We identified three potential alternative composite gender indices: the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Index (GGI), the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Economic Opportunity Index (WEOI), and the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI). The GGI is a comprehensive annual economic survey but does not consider gender-specific indicators such as reproductive health, political empowerment and (unpaid) labour market participation. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Women’s Economic Opportunity Index (WEOI) would have been a useful alternative dataset, but it is not open source (the present authors did not have funds available to subscribe). The OECD SIGI released its second dataset (the first was in 2009) in May 2012. This dataset covers non-OECD and non-EU countries that have populations over one million. The focus is on developing countries undergoing rapid economic, social and political development. There are 102 countries surveyed in SIGI, with full data available for 86 non-EU and non-OECD countries. The values range from 0–1 with Argentina scoring the best SIGI at 0.0069 and Mali the worst at 0.6011 (OECD, 2012). The SIGI indicator range is much more extensive than GII, with fourteen variables in five categories (see below). Indeed, SIGI attempts to cover the gender knowledge gaps identified by Schmeidl and Piza-Lopez (2002) concerning the inclusion of domestic/‘private life’ variables that affect women’s empowerment (Klasen and Wink, 2003). As such, it includes variables that are often overlooked in other composite gender equality indices, including discriminatory family codes, restricted physical integrity, son bias (fertility preference towards boys and suspected practices of infant femicide), restricted resources and unique entitlements, and restricted civil liberties. The inclusion of SIGI indicators was an attempt to respond to critiques about the systematic (economic) bias against women’s lived experience in extant frameworks.

As Table 1 shows, all datasets identify a common group of states, though the levels of risk they identify in each country are significantly different. If we were to predict those countries at highest risk of mass atrocities by virtue of their gender inequality indices alone, we would see that the GII and SIGI lists produce quite different rankings on this performance. In examining Table 1, compare GII (greatest inequality to those that sit just above the ‘world average’ shaded according to 70% range; 60% range; 50% range; and 40% range), with the SIGI range (SIGI range is 0–1, all countries listed that performed worse than median performer – Myanmar, ranked 43rd with SIGI value 0.2405). In comparing the GII and SIGI ten worst performing states, in terms of gender inequality, the two lists agreed on four states’ performance in this area (Mali, DR Congo, Yemen and Chad), although it should be observed that GII did not report data for three of SIGI’s worst ten (Guinea, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan) and SIGI did not profile two of GII’s worst ten (Central African Republic, Papua New Guinea). Most significantly, in terms of data coverage – and ramifications for early warning –neither GII nor SIGI posted data (due to lack of consistent data) for six of the countries identified by the Secretary-General’s reports to the Security Council (2012) as having a high risk of SGBV (Ban, 2012a).

Given disparities in the number of countries identified as ‘high risk’ in the frameworks, and being cognizant of the fact that policy-makers need to set priorities and allocate resources, we then reduced each list to (a maximum of) 22 countries. We compared situations of ‘high risk’ in the lists to see whether gender inequality provides early warning of countries at risk of atrocities, particularly sexual violence using the 2012 and 2013 UN Secretary-General report on situations under risk of widespread and systematic sexual violence.

This analysis produced mixed results – open, of course, to competing interpretations (see Table 3). The central finding is that in relation to the specific risk of SGBV, none of the non-UN lists correlated closely with the places of concern identified by the Secretary-General in the same year (2012). Naturally, the counter argument could be that these lists are not expected to correlate; but that is our point – they are not expected to correlate and this should be a concern for those interested in addressing high-risk situations of mass atrocities, which includes SGBV.

The Genocide Watch list produced the highest replication (11 out of 22) with the UN Secretary-General’s list of countries at high risk of widespread SGBV, but this was still relatively low. The GII and SIGI fell short of the Genocide Watch list by three cases, though gaps between the datasets may explain the failure to list these cases. For example, GII did not provide data for Egypt, Guinea and Somalia, unlike Genocide Watch and SIGI. If we presume that the high SIGI rating for Egypt, Somalia and Guinea would have been replicated in the GII scores, if we then make the same presumption for the GII cases that SIGI did not include (Central African Republic, Cote D’Ivoire, Liberia and Kenya), the GII list would be equal to Stanton and the SIGI list would be most correctly aligned with the Secretary-General’s 2012 list. However, the assumption that GII would produce the same scores as SIGI for these countries could be queried given that GII and SIGI scores did not always correlate for the same country.

Findings

Do gender inequality lists demonstrate their early warning capacity for countries at risk of atrocities, particularly sexual violence, and do they have greater capacity to highlight risk than early warning lists that exclude gender indicators? As shown above, the results here are mixed. GII and SIGI were able to produce lists that were comparable to the (most expansive) Genocide Watch early warning list and the UN Secretary General’s list of countries at risk of widespread sexual violence – even though the GII and SIGI use only socio-economic gender inequality indicators and no armed conflict indicators. However, none of these lists was accurate in identifying over 50% of the countries described as being at high risk of widespread and systematic SGBV by the Secretary-General. But, the Secretary-General’s list is a political list and may not reflect all cases and all risks – as the significant differences between the 2012 list and recent 2013 list suggests (Ban, 2012a, 2013b).

This preliminary research suggests that gender-specific indicators may be as useful as traditional non-gendered measures for early warning of imminent mass atrocities. Moreover, failure to consider systematic gender inequality and/or the systematic use of sexual violence as high-risk indicators needs to be reconsidered. Indeed, given the gaps in gender data which had a negative effect on the gender indices, it is possible that gendered indicators might outperform general early warning predecessors. In turn, these frameworks might be improved by including gender-specific indicators, particularly when the focus is on predicting widespread and systematic sexual and gender-based violence. This underscores the importance of states implementing their commitment to Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) and strengthening their collection and publication of gender-focused indicators.

A second finding is that the UN system has a solid understanding of high risk of sexual violence in situations of conflict, post-conflict and civil unrest, even prior to the establishment of the 2014 Early Warning Matrix (Ban, 2012a: Annex), but the list is political and vulnerable to exclusions that would not occur if weighed by evidence alone (Security Council Report, 2013: 5). This poses the question of whether resources should be poured into refining analytical models before producing lists. While there is an urgent need to improve the quality and quantity of data relating to already established gender focused indicators, the evidence here suggests that there are real limits to what can be achieved with large-N risk assessments that are ultimately vulnerable to political decisions regarding who is listed and who is not. Moreover, lists do not mitigate the need for ongoing system-wide collection and assessment of information from the field and its incorporation into policy-making.

Our analysis suggests that gender inequality indices alone are as likely to identify risk of SGBV atrocities. This leads us to the view that related early warning frameworks must regularly engage with gender-specific indicators, Of course, sole attention to gender-specific indicators is insufficient for effective early warning frameworks, but so too is it insufficient for gender-specific indicators to be continually excluded from these frameworks. Cooperation between different agencies and mandates is required in order to use these frameworks to undertake preventative actions in high-risk situations. We argue that at this stage the logic for suggesting such analysis could be best promoted by the alignment of the R2P and WPS agendas.

Conclusion

It was correct to argue in the past that R2P paid little attention to hard-won advances by WPS advocates in the three pillars of prevention, participation and protection. While the two agendas remain distinct in terms of their definition and scope of their application, a shared interest in prevention of atrocities in the first place is an important cross-cutting theme. The risk, at present, is that both communities ignore potential complementarities stemming from this shared ambition and thereby miss chances to bring interested and engaged partners together to promote the prevention of atrocities. Without an alliance, evidence-gathering exercises and advocacy for preventative action will remain disjointed. Moreover, connections from shared data, shared evidence and shared policy responses amongst the R2P and WPS communities could address, as we see above, the gaps in understanding the relationship between gender-based human rights abuses, gender inequality and the commission of mass atrocities.

The obligation of states, as well as regional and international organizations, to fulfill their ‘responsibility to protect’ requires gendered participation in the prevention and mitigation of mass atrocities. The main message from the R2P principle post-2005 has been to advance efforts on the prevention of mass atrocities. As Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon noted at the 2013 UN General Assembly Informal Interactive Dialogue on ‘The responsibility to protect –state responsibility and prevention’: ‘Let us…remember that the responsibility to protect seeks not only to protect populations at the eleventh hour but, first and foremost, to prevent crises from erupting at all’ (Ban, 2013c). The WPS agenda has established an equally strong record in advocating for political will to address gender inequality as a conflict prevention measure.

However, in the area of mass atrocities crimes – which can occur outside of the conflict environment – understanding how gender inequality heightens risk of these crimes and how to bring gender-based atrocity crimes to the attention of the UN Security Council has remained politically challenging. The challenge is for the Security Council to agree to be briefed on SGBV atrocities outside of armed conflict, which will likely persist if gender inequality remains a relatively unacknowledged indicator of risk in early warning frameworks – as stated in the recent UN Secretary-General’s report on R2P (Ban, 2013b: 5, 7–8). Existing early warning frameworks have little ability to establish the relationship between gender inequality and the risk of mass atrocities that could have been of particular assistance in recent situations such as Mali, Syria and Central African Republic, where widespread and systematic targeting of women and men for sexual torture, rape and slavery was reportedly deployed against ethnic and political groups prior to the onset of these conflicts (Ban, 2012a).

Therefore we propose, as a first step, that the WPS and R2P communities, primarily located in New York, should be brought together to discuss shared areas of focus and cases of mutual concern. This could be facilitated as a working group on women and R2P – a suggestion put forward by the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect. There must also be deeper engagement with gender inequality, gendered discrimination and the role of the R2P principle in assisting states to address these human rights violations. It would be an important step forward for R2P-friendly states to specifically address this issue at their annual Ministerial Meeting of the Responsibility to Protect, organized by the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect, n.d.).

To date the Office of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the Special Adviser for the Responsibility to Protect have not addressed the role of gender inequality and gendered violence in early warning frameworks. It would be valuable for this Office to provide an exploratory paper on R2P and WPS that details the state, regional and international level responsibilities to address the relationship between gender inequality and human rights atrocities; deeper knowledge of this relationship is vital not only for the prevention of SGBV crimes but also for broader measures for prevention of atrocities, as noted in the 2013 UN Secretary-General R2P report (Ban, 2013a: 5).

It is not enough to say R2P must have a gendered approach without the WPS community being engaged in the development of this approach. The WPS agenda has a long history at state, regional and international levels that will be valuable to the R2P community in progressing mutual agendas, particularly the prevention of mass atrocities. Conversely, the R2P community’s emphasis that addressing the conditions that lead to mass atrocity crimes, including widespread and systematic sexual violence, is the primary responsibility of states adds political and normative force to implement WPS commitments in state, regional and international security institutions to address structural gender inequality. As this article has identified, there are presently few early warning frameworks to advise on a gendered approach to preventive diplomacy that is directed at the prevention of mass atrocity crimes. Engagement with this task alone, of mutual interest to WPS and R2P communities, would go a long way towards establishing a roadmap for states and the international community to uphold their responsibility to protect and women’s peace and security.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The research in this paper was conducted as part of the activities of the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, University of Queensland (DFAT Agreement 63684).

Funding

The Centre receives funding support from the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Notes

Author biographies

Sara E Davies is an ARC Future Fellow, Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology. She is Program Director of the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities program at the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, University of Queensland and Co-Chief Investigator with Professor Jacqui True on an ARC Discovery Project, ‘Prevention of Sexual Violence in the Asia Pacific (PSVAP)’. Sara’s research interests are in global health governance, prevention of mass atrocities and the responsibility to protect. Sara is the author of Global Politics of Health (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010) and Legitimising Rejection: International Refugee Law in South East Asia (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers); and has a forthcoming publication, Disease Diplomacy, co-authored with Adam Kamradt-Scott and Simon Rushton (John Hopkins University Press).

Sarah Teitt is Deputy Director and Researcher at the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, University of Queensland. She is responsible for advancing research and building partnerships aimed at the prevention of genocide and other mass atrocities in the Asia Pacific. In this role, Sarah has helped facilitate the establishment of cross-sector national programmes in the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia and Thailand to raise awareness among government officials, academics and civil society representatives on sovereignty as responsibility, R2P and the causes and prevention of mass atrocities. Sarah’s research interests center on China’s multilateral diplomacy in humanitarian crises experiencing or at risk of genocide and mass atrocities, and the link between the protection and promotion of women’s rights and the prevention of mass atrocities.

Zim Nwokora is a post-doctoral research fellow in Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne. He held a position prior to this as a post-doctoral research fellow at Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University. Before this he was a doctoral student at Oxford University. His research methods training includes courses on statistical analysis and game theoretic modelling. His research experience is mainly in American Politics and Comparative Politics, especially relating to party politics. His published work in this area includes ‘The Presidential Leadership Dilemma’ (SUNY Press, forthcoming), a volume co-edited with Lara M. Brown and Julia R. Azari that examines how American presidents are stretched between the demands of their party and the national interest.

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