Women’s Participation in the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Overcoming Barriers

Increasing the proportion of women in uniform in the peacekeeping operations (PO) is recognized by UN member-states as a necessary and desirable goal prompted by a number of factors, such as: a more gender-balanced peacekeeping force is able to improve operational effectiveness and is also able to let the PO significantly enhance the achievement of the goals set out in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Despite the 20 years of international and regional efforts to increase the number and active involvement of women in peacekeeping, the number of women engaged in peacekeeping operations in Africa still remains low. This problem is affected by a number of factors, starting with gender stereotypes and ending with insufficient consideration of women’s participation in peacekeeping at the country level. The main purpose of the article is to analyse the main trends in the participation of women from African countries in peacekeeping, dwell on the problems of increasing the number of such women and identify the obstacles in this path. As a result, promoting the WPS agenda and implementing initiatives of the UN Resolution 1325 would be much easier with the guidance and advice provided to the member-states by the UN, the AU and the non-governmental organizations working in the sphere of peacekeeping. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.