Masculinities, Violence, and Peace

Bias, Leandra; Janah, Yasmine (2022). Masculinities, Violence, and Peace swisspeace

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This scoping study explores the relationships between masculinities, violence, and peace. It is oriented to contribute to France's efforts towards effective conflict prevention and peacebuilding in accordance with feminist principles. It aims at supporting France's adoption of the new Prevention, Resilience and Sustainable Peace Strategy 2023-2027 and in line with the objectives of the third National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) and the Feminist Diplomacy.
The authors draw attention to the evidence that gender analysis is essential for collecting early warning information on the potential eruption or recurrence of violence. However, what currently prevails is an interpretation whereby gender is largely understood and used as a synonym for women. While the connections between men, masculinities, violence prevention, and peacebuilding are multiple and crucial, international, and national security practices often struggle to engage with masculinities. The study provides an assessment of efforts, approaches, and initiatives undertaken to integrate masculinities in peacebuilding policy and practice. The study explores Tunisia and Lebanon as two illustrative case studies and builds on a series of discussions and over 30 interviews with key representatives of civil society organisations, Lebanese and Tunisian governmental bodies, the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and French external action operators. The study shows that there is large consensus across diplomats, policymakers and advocates that working on masculinities yields significant potential to redirect gender sensitivity to a more transformative approach to violence prevention, fragility, and peacebuilding. Simultaneously, the authors discern important gaps that are not sufficiently tackled yet and emphasise that translating potentials into practice will need to be weighed against certain risks, including, misinterpretation and co-optation. In its concluding section, the study suggests the following distinction: masculinities as a way of thinking and as a way of acting. This distinction serves to provide practical and evidence-based recommendations for potentials and risks associated with using masculinities in prevention strategies in particular, the WPS agenda and Feminist Foreign Policy more generally.

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