Opportunity for Gendering the Responsibility to Protect Agenda at the United Nations?

Despite its rapid diplomatic rise in the UN setting and global recognition as an established norm, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has yet to substantially incorporate gender and directly engage with the complementary Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda. The article discusses this R2P limitation and ways to rectify it through capitalizing on a landmark UN annual report on R2P and cross-cutting areas of engagement with the WPS agenda. To do so, the article proceeds in three sections that mirror the three-pronged classification of overlapping knowledge projects identified for early feminist scholarship. First, the article exposes the extent and effect of masculinist bias in early R2P formulations and R2P's failure to engage explicitly with gender perspectives until the pathbreaking twelfth annual report on R2P. Second, the complementarities between the WPS, gender equality, and R2P are examined in order to highlight the commonalities seen when “adding women” to these agendas. Third, the article examines what gendering the R2P agenda at the United Nations would entail through a reconstruction of R2P that recognizes gender as an analytical and structural category. It is argued that while the progressive 2020 Annual Report on R2P will likely become the reference point for weighing what a gendered R2P agenda should look like, and will hopefully trigger a much-needed reorientation of existing R2P policies as gender-responsive, limitations remain due to three factors: the lack of gender-sensitive analysis at the United Nations, lingering analytical tensions between the WPS and R2P communities, and the current politically resistant climate, which limits a gender audit.