Norms and Practices in UN Peacekeeping: Gender and the Environment

Speakers:

• Dr Georgina Holmes, University of Reading
• Dr Lucile Maertens, University of Lausanne

Chair: Dr Kseniya Oksamytna, War Studies, KCL

 

It’s our pleasure to invite you to the talk ‘Norms and Practices in UN Peacekeeping' hosted by the Conflict Security and Development Research Group and the School of Security Studies’ Regional Security and Development Theme.

UN peacekeeping operations are a core pillar of the global peace and security architecture and a multi-billion undertaking reshaping lives around the world. They reflect norms prevalent in the international society but also offer a space for developing new norms or contesting existing ones. The two presentations focus on the evolution and implementation of gender norms and norms regarding the protection of the environment in UN peacekeeping operations. The presentations are based on the special section of International Peacekeeping co-edited by Kseniya Oksamytna and John Karlsrud: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13533312.2019.1600637

Dr Georgina Holmes’ presentation is entitled ‘Gender Mainstreaming in Practice: Pre-deployment Training of Rwandan Female Peacekeepers’.

Dr Georgina Holmes is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Reading. She is co-convenor of the BISA Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group and Visiting Research Fellow at the National University of Rwanda. Her research focuses on gender issues and norm implementation dynamics in peacekeeping, and gender and security sector reform in African and European militaries. Georgina has published articles in several peer reviewed academic journals including Security Dialogue, Millennium: Journal of International Studies; International Peacekeeping, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Journal of Genocide Studies and The RUSI Journal and is the author of Women and War in Rwanda: Gender, Media and the Representation of Genocide (2013, I.B Tauris).

Dr Lucile Maertens presentation is entitled ‘From Blue to Green? UN Peacekeeping and the Environment’.

Dr Lucile Maertens is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Lausanne and Associate Fellow at CERI/SciencesPo in Paris. Her research focuses on international organisations’ action at the intersection between security and environmental issues. She has recently published an article ‘Depoliticisation as a Securitising Move: The Case of the United Nations Environment Programme’ in European Journal of International Security (2018). She is working on a monograph entitled Why International Organizations Hate Politics. Depoliticizing the World (with Marieke Louis, forthcoming in 2020, Routledge).