Women and development, not gender and politics: explaining ASEAN's failure to engage with the women, peace and security agenda.

• Author: Davies, Mathew
• Position: Association of Southeast Asian Nations - Essay

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) declarations and documents have long mentioned the role of women in economics and social cohesion, and more recently the organization has explicitly committed itself to gender mainstreaming goals. (1) Yet the compatibility between much of ASEAN's activities in this area and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda that was adopted by the United Nations in Security Council Resolution 1325 in October 2000 has not been recognized by ASEAN. (2) Indeed, ASEAN has avoided any institutionalization of the WPS agenda. As highlighted in the preamble of Resolution 1325, the WPS agenda exposes the experiences of women as the "vast majority of those adversely affected by armed conflict" and seeks to address those experiences by improving the ability of women to proactively address those concerns. As such, the WPS agenda focuses on recognizing and cementing the political agency of women to participate fully in their communities and home countries.

The absence of the WPS agenda from the formal commitments of ASEAN is puzzling for three reasons. First, there is strong consensus that Southeast Asia is a region where the patterns of violence and repression reveal a clear need for a WPS agenda. (3) Second, over the last fifteen years, ASEAN has moved to engage, albeit haltingly, with civil and political human rights, showing that it is at least willing to talk about the issue of individual political agency that is so central to the WPS agenda. Third, ASEAN has positioned its commitment to human rights as a vital pre-requisite for the realization of regional peace and security, indicating that the link between individual well-being and traditional concerns regarding state security has already been made.

In this article I tackle a question that has yet to be addressed in the literature concerned with WPS and how ASEAN relates to that agenda--not whether ASEAN should, or even could, adopt a WPS agenda, but instead, why has it not yet done so? Why has a regional organization with a long history of engagement with women and an "on paper" commitment to peace, security, and human rights not developed any explicit engagement with the WPS agenda?

While traditional explanations of ASEAN's failure to act in this regard emphasize the deleterious effect of the "ASEAN Way"--the norms of consensus and unanimity that continue to predominate within ASEAN--and the inability of diverse states to generate agreement, I argue that this approach does not explain the details of ASEAN's engagement with women. Were the traditional explanations to hold, we should expect to see the same type of engagement with the WPS agenda as we do with other human rights issues in ASEAN: nominal commitment diluted with parallel and dominant commitments to non-intervention and consensus. Instead, we see something very different--a complete official silence on WPS. To explain this silence, I argue that the ASEAN elites remain largely committed to a conservative understanding of women (and crucially, not gender) as a homogeneous and separate category that requires specific and separate institutions. Significantly, this understanding of women has allowed elites to also frame addressing women's issues as a vehicle in which to achieve their pre-existing concerns with economic growth and social and political stability, goals that are at the very heart of ASEAN's mission. This traditional understanding of women by elites curtails the ability of those elites to engage with the WPS agenda because it renders them resistant to perceiving, let alone valuing, the gendered conception of agency which is at the heart of the WPS agenda. The conservative milieu of ASEAN elites is often occluded by the more proactive and activist nature of those who work within ASEAN's gender architecture who are often "practitioner-activists", and we must distinguish between the array of work plans, declarations and commissions, and the reason why elites have allowed and encouraged such an approach to flourish.

I start by presenting the development of ASEAN's commitment to gender and its evolution into the system that is in place today. I then highlight the apparent compatibility of the WPS agenda with ASEAN's agenda and ask why the WPS agenda is absent from ASEAN. I frame that absence as a consequence not of ASEAN's usual antipathy towards proactive commitments that concern citizens, but instead as a particularly traditionalist account of gendered agency. The revelation of this "hidden" reason behind the absence of the WPS agenda provides a platform from which to consider the potential for ASEAN to engage with the WPS agenda in the future. At the close of the article, I examine the November 2015 ASEAN 2025 document as a way to both identify potential avenues to progress WPS within ASEAN and to consider the remaining obstacles to such progress.

ASEAN's Commitment to Women and Gender Concerns

My aim in this opening section is to present the nature of ASEAN's position on women and gender by examining the historic evolution of that commitment from the 1970s. In particular, I emphasize how that commitment has grown over time from an interest in women to an explicit engagement with gender and questions of agency, at least at the level of the "practitioner-activists" who work within the institutions of ASEAN that are concerned with women/ gender.

ASEAN's engagement with gender commenced with the convening of the ASEAN Women Leaders' Conference in 1975. In 1976, ASEAN created the Sub-Committee on Women and, by 1981, its replacement, the ASEAN Women's Programme. The work of these first commitments to women was framed by a developmental approach--the 1976 Sub-Committee held discussions on health, training, housing and human-trafficking issues. (4) The record of meetings held throughout the 1980s continued this developmental theme, and in the mid-1980s the ASEAN Women's Programme created the Clearinghouse on Women in Development which was tasked with the development of a Thesaurus on Women in Development (released in 1996 and which explicated how gender and development were interlinked) as well as a range of activities on collecting data and organizing expertise and various educational activities. (5) The 1988 Declaration of the Advancement of Women in the ASEAN Region tasked members to "promote and implement the equitable and effective participation of women" in "various levels of the political, economic, social and cultural life", representing a move into at least an on-paper recognition of the political dimension of women's lives. (6) The declaration called for the enabling of women as "active agents and beneficiaries" of development, while suggesting the need to integrate gender perspectives into the various national plans in member states. (7)

ASEAN's commitment to women were given new impetus as part of the process of regional reform in pursuit of "caring societies" that became a key aim of regional cooperation after the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis (AFC). The 2004 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in the ASEAN Region, sitting alongside its 1988 predecessor, frames violence against women as "an obstacle to the achievement of equality, development and peace". (8) This declaration outlines eight individual goals including information sharing, gender mainstreaming, coordinating domestic policy alignment and strengthening cooperation to share best practices. (9) The mid-2000s saw both the 1988 and 2004 declarations operationalized in work plans. The 2005 Work Plan for Women's Advancement and Gender Equality, which was based on the 1988 declaration, focused on integration, protection, gender and globalization, employability and building gender partnerships with stakeholders. (10) The 2006 Work Plan to Operationalize the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, based on the 2004 declaration, was innovative in the ASEAN context given its "ecological framework" that sought to situate gender rights, and their violations, in concentric circles of individual, familial, communal and social contexts. (11) Six objectives were specified: increasing public awareness of violence against women; increasing female awareness of their rights; ensuring gender responsive policies; increasing data availability on violence against women; strengthening institutional mechanisms; and promoting stronger cooperation at all levels of government. (12) These documents suggest that by the mid-2000s, within the various institutions tasked with engaging with women, ASEAN was talking as much about gender as a conceptual and political category as it was about women as a homogeneous group with special, separate and non-political needs.

Today, ASEAN's commitment to women and gender is institutionally complex. The ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Women (AMMW), established in 2011 as part of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community, provides executive leadership and consultation on gender issues. The ASEAN Committee on Women (ACW) (which replaced the ASEAN Women's Programme) sits below the AMMW. The AMMW and ACW have crafted a joint work plan to replace the 2005 and 2006 work plans. (13) This new work plan shows a keen awareness of gender and comprises four conceptual elements: intensifying work on protection against violence while also promoting gender analysis elsewhere; moving beyond a simple "add women and stir" approach to a more contextual account of the needs of women; strategic intersectoral linkages to advance ASEAN; and expanding the reach of gender mainstreaming. (14)

Another institutional expression of gender within ASEAN is separate to the AMMW and the ACW. The ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC), which reports to the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Social Welfare and Development (AMMSWD), seeks to "promote and protect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of women and children in...