Reports & Publications

Occasional Reports

Gender Inclusion for Social Resilience: A Key Factor in Disaster Reduction, Relief, and Recovery
by Milad Pournik, Jaeeun Chung, and Barbara Miller
December 2012

This report offers a brief review of the concept of social resilience, especially in relation to natural disasters and with specific attention to women and girls as victims of disasters and active participants in disaster prevention and response. It next provides a summary of a conference that took place at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs on October 11, 2012, marking the United Nations International Day for Disaster Reduction and its 2012 theme, Women & Girls: The inVisible Source of Resilience. Last, it summarizes how social resilience can create more secure societies in a changing world.
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Integrating a Gender Perspective into Development: What Works and Why?
by Barbara Miller and Andrea Bertone
December 2011

This report first provides an introduction to gender inclusion in the U.S. Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). The second section provides the text of the Annual James P. Grant Lecture, "Gender, Diplomacy, and Development," given by The Honorable Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues in the U.S. State Department. The third section offers a summary of a Roundtable at which five experts on women in development provide examples from their experience on what works in promoting and implementing a gender perspective in development policies, programs, and projects. Each speaker provides a concrete example of success. The report concludes with a section on data needs for gender-responsive development.
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Working Papers

Civil Society Organizations and Empowerment of Women and Girls in Iran
by Milad Pournik
May 2013

This report is a preliminary attempt at shedding light on the grassroots work done by civil society to advance the standing of women and girls. The report provides a brief history of the women's movement in Iran and a review of the current state of civil society groups working with women and girls. A statistical background provides the context in which the CSOs featured in this report work to empower women and girls. Informed by interviews conducted by the author, the report highlights the activities of featured CSOs, which range from helping female drug addicts to working with Afghan refugee women and children; from promoting women entrepreneurs to educating adolescent girls; and from supporting HIV/AIDS widows to rehabilitating disabled children.

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Explaining the Variation in Gender Composition of Personnel Contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations
by Kerry F. Crawford, James H. Lebovic, Julia M. Macdonald
March 2013

How do we account for the dearth of female contributions to UN peace operations? More specifically, how well do political explanations account for variation in the cross-national contribution of female personnel to UN missions? For answers, this study proceeds as follows. First, it examines the demand-side pull to contribute female personnel to UN operations by assessing the costs of female non-participation. Second, it presents theoretical explanations for the varying contributions of personnel to UNPOs. These explanations include the political and socio-economic character of the contributing states, international reputations and norms, and various demand-side influences exerted by missions. Third, it presents descriptive statistical results that reveal the depth and scope of the under-representation of women in peace operations. Fourth, it specifies and tests a cross-sectional time-series logistic model (with contributor-mission-year as the unit of analysis) that competitively tests various explanations for female personnel contributions to each mission in the 2010-11 period. Although it finds significant support for domestic political explanations, even when controlling for gender equality within a society, it concludes that gender diversity is not a primary goal of most contributors and is largely an unintended by-product of force sizes.

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Defying Strategy: United States Non-Strategic Recognition of Wartime Sexual Violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo
by Kerry F. Crawford
March 2013

Do states devote valuable material resources and political capital to condemning atrocities when armed intervention is not imminent or when the perpetrator is not an adversary? By exploring United States efforts to condemn the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, this paper seeks to understand state recognition of wartime atrocities abroad. Observing that strategic concerns cannot sufficiently explain a state's rhetorical and material efforts to condemn the use of wartime sexual violence, this paper offers an alternative theory of non-strategic recognition of wartime sexual violence through a case study of United States efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The study finds that the perception, among activists and policymakers, of sexual violence as a weapon of war led the United States government to rhetorically and materially respond to wartime sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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Women's Representation in Judiciaries Worldwide:
Arguments in Favor of Increasing the Gender Diversity on the Bench
by Joshua Doherty
December 2012

While increasing women's representation in legislatures has been widely promoted as a means for ensuring women's participation in governance, there has not been a parallel movement for increasing gender parity in judiciaries around the globe. Two major theories prevail in support of increasing women's representation on the bench. The first proposes that female judges will render judgments more favorable to realizing broader social gender equality. The second suggests that gender parity in the judiciary is a normatively good end (rather than a means to an end) and that moving towards gender parity increases public confidence in the institution. After presenting these theories, this paper discusses major barriers to increasing female representation in the judiciary. This paper then contextualizes the lack of attention this topic receives from agencies and development organizations that focus on global women's empowerment, highlights significant gaps in the available data on this topic, and presents suggestions for filling these gaps.

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