Gender balance in peacekeeping operations: progress and challenges

Abstract

This article addresses the advances and challenges to achieve a greater balance between men and women who participate in military components of United Nations peacekeeping operations. There is relative consensus about the importance of increasing female military presence in the field; however it is also important to analyze the extent to which the increase in the number of women satisfactorily contests conventional ideas about the spaces to be occupied by them in UN peacekeeping. Anchored by gender and feminists theories, this article problematizes the United Nations' discourse of Gender Balance.

Gender; Peacekeeping; United Nations