The Gendered Effects of UN Peacebuilding
P4-06
Presented by: Caroline Brandt, Laura Huber
UN peace operations are increasingly focused not just on keeping the peace but also on building the peacebuilding capacity of communities (United Nations 2020). The literature on UN peace operations has largely overlooked their peacebuilding capacity; instead, focusing on the coercive security capacity of UN peacekeeping troops and their effect on violence reduction, or “negative peace.” Based on the findings from a quasi-experimental impact evaluation of US$ 44 million that the UN Peacebuilding Fund allocated to Burundi between 2007 and 2013, we demonstrate that UN peace operations build community-level peacebuilding capacity, contributing to “positive peace.” We also show that this peacebuilding capacity affects men and women differently. Our study, which combining a large household level survey with almost 200 semi-structured interviews, demonstrates that UN peacebuilding efforts particularly increase the capacity of women to mediate conflict in their communities. At the same time, in areas where the UN is engaged in community-level peacebuilding, men report a decreased level of confidence in women’s decision-making and increased levels of discrimination against men, pointing to backlash that often accompanies gender-focused empowerment. These findings have implications for the literature on UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding, identifying the peacebuilding effects of UN peace operations while pointing to the complex gender dynamics of community-based peacebuilding efforts.