To maintain international peace and security. Women’s leadership and participation in the Italian and Swedish armed forces from a human rights’ perspective

Considering the major role played by the armed forces in the maintenance of international peace and security, this research looks at the participation and leadership of women in peace and security processes within military institutions. Military and police forces have been traditionally employed in peacekeeping operations (PKOs). Although the UN Charter makes no reference to peacekeeping as we currently know it, it has become an immensely important component of collective security, which is characterized by using militaries to assist the establishment of the essential elements of sustainable peace in post-conflict societies. At the same time, though, the boundaries between conflict prevention, peace-making, peacekeeping, peacebuilding and peace enforcement have become progressively blurred, indeed peace operations are rarely limited to one type of activity. In fact, military and police forces are ever more utilised in processes of peacebuilding, which involve the development of PKOs in long-term efforts to reconstruct, reconcile and restore post-conflict communities. Considering the need for democratic control of the armed forces and for their legitimization in the eyes of society, these institutions are increasingly required to reflect the values of the society they are part of, thus an insufficient representation of women in the institution is a major issue. The specific focus of this investigation examines the Nordic countries, and specifically Sweden, considering their strong involvement in international peacekeeping and crises management and, simultaneously, in gender equality efforts in many societal sectors. On the other hand, looking at the Mediterranean shores of Europe, the Italian setting is analysed in comparison with the Nordic countries in order to observe potential differences and similarities between these two contexts. Indeed, while there is very scarce research on the Italian armed forces, this analysis suggests quite unexpected patterns in the comparison between Sweden and Italy in the overall multi-level global context. What is particularly puzzling is not only the general still very low representation of women in the armed forces and in peacekeeping, particularly, but also to observe how two countries characterized by quite different contexts have similarly very meagre numbers of women within their militaries. On the other hand, this study acknowledges that numerical representation is not sufficient but what is really required is meaningful and effective participation, starting from the leadership level, as explicitly demanded by the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda, introduced by UNSCR 1325 in 2000. Thus, the main research question of this study is: How the WPS Agenda is perceived to have influenced women’s leadership and participation in peace and security processes within the Italian and Swedish armed forces? In order to answer this comprehensive question and considering also that UNSCR 1325 is an important example of how feminist activism has influenced the global security agenda, this research makes reference to a critical feminist paradigm while utilising a critical discourse analysis so as to understand the different narratives behind the policies adopted at the different international levels and within the national settings. Indeed, the data, which are employed to examine this puzzle and have been collected by means of structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews with different stakeholders, policies and statistics available online, in public archives or released directly to the researcher, also by means of field research, are compared and examined side by side with the aim of understanding how the various discourses on the WPS Agenda connect and relate in developing specific framings of the agenda itself and its intended transformative potential.