I have always believed that our institutions should seek to reflect the diversity of our community. So you might well be expecting me to bemoan the fact that there are still too few women inhabiting the secret cloisters of the national intelligence and security community, particularly in senior positions. And you might expect me to issue yet another appeal for a concerted attack on the glass ceiling.

You might also be expecting me to offer you all further encouragement in tackling the somewhat clubby character of the intelligence and security community which remains predominantly a male preserve.

There is no doubt that we need more women in the security business; equally, we need more women in leadership positions. So, more strength to your arm, collectively and individually, in your pursuit of equality. But what I want to focus on tonight is why women are so important in enabling our national intelligence and security community to meet the challenges that uncertain times bring with them.

There is a need for a careful reconsideration of what security is fundamentally about and whether our national responses to security issues are the most appropriate for uncertain times.

The paradigm change that may be necessary is only possible if the security community itself undergoes rejuvenation and transformation. One of the best ways to generate fresh thinking and innovation in any business is to ensure that gender equality and ethnic diversity are put to work to drive change.

Do we need to remind ourselves more persistently that we will not succeed or become safer by closing ourselves off from each other or from the world? Security challenges are best met working with others rather than turning inwards. And history reminds us of the risks that inward-looking, disengaged societies pose—risks of misunderstanding, tension and conflict.

Now I don’t claim expertise on these issues. What I can say, however, is that the concept of security for most Australians would also encompass economic and financial security, affordable health care, job and income security, quality childcare and the promise of a dignified retirement.

In other words, ‘security’ has a much broader connotation than the more threat-based protective and response concepts on which a lot of public policy concentrates. This in no way diminishes the work that you all do.

But what it might suggest is that a broader understanding of what security means for the general populace and where it impacts on people’s lives may in turn expand the range of tools at your disposal and the effectiveness of the programs you design and implement.

Disrupted times bring with them a raft of cares and worries. The French economist Thomas Piketty has identified economic inequality as a principal cause of the political instability currently infecting Europe—the Brexit vote and its currently unforeseeable consequences, the rise of radical parties on both the left and the right, the resurgence of nationalism in countries like Austria, Hungary and Poland, and the politics of exclusion on religious and racial grounds.

Into this mix come historical grievances driven in more or less equal parts by colonialism on the one hand and its collapse on the other. The picture becomes even more bleak when we see political leaders who reject the operating rules by which the international system has worked for the past seventy years, the emergence of new international players that want to impose new operating rules, and all of this rendered even more toxic by the emergence of nihilist ideologies that advocate death rather than tolerance.

Many of you would be familiar with the impact that discontinuity can have on complex systems. But complex systems generally have sufficient resilience to manage discontinuities, to bounce back relatively quickly. Indeed, many of the security features inbuilt into complex systems are specifically designed to deal with discontinuity.

Disruption is at the centre of the malaise that we see globally. Political and economic disruption are the main drivers of strategic disruption. It is that form of disruption that is undermining the confidence of people everywhere, generating care, worry and, more alarmingly, fear. And fear is particularly dangerous because it prompts irrational and dangerous actions.

You would all be aware of the call by many international commentators for governments to deal with the ‘root causes’ of the various forms of politically motivated violence presently affecting the global community. Of course, few of those commentators actually identify what those ‘root causes’ are.

But what we do know is that the so-called ‘root causes’ lie at the intersection of the economic, social, cultural, ethnic and ideological forces that lend movement and colour to human collective activity. And the agent who acts at the intersection of these forces is always an individual person.

In a thoughtful opinion piece published in the UK Guardian a couple of weeks ago, the novelist and former security specialist Nicholas Searle cautioned against rhetoric as a component of security policy.

Sweeping terms like ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ cannot alone explain the breakdown of law and order across the Middle East and that have spread their tentacles into Europe, North America, South and South East Asia, Africa and even Australia. It is interesting to note that the incoming National Security Advisor in the Trump administration, General H.R. McMaster, has also counselled against the use of terms such as ‘Islamic terrorism’.

Politically motivated violence is a form of criminal activity. It needs to be dealt with as such. And as an international phenomenon, politically motivated violence will best be contained and eliminated when nations, some of which are Muslim, work collaboratively to address the broad security needs of the communities in which the perpetrators live.

That kind of collaboration depends for its success on the ability to address the human security needs that condition fear and violence. That kind of collaboration will also serve to identify, detain and prosecute those who undertake politically motivated violence.

Rejuvenation and regeneration should always be front of mind for those who lead high-performing organisations. Subtlety and nuance in both policy and operations are most likely to be effective when organisations are truly representative of the communities they serve.

Open communities have the strength of inclusion. Closed communities have the spectre of fear.

This article is part of a series on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ that The Strategist is publishing in recognition of International Women’s Day 2017.

In the Security Council debate around Resolution 2242 in 2015—which marked 15 years since the adoption of the ground breaking Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS)—a key refrain was: ‘we’ve been paying lip service to the importance of this issue for 15 years. It’s now time for less talk and more action’.

Resolution 1325 has become the guide for all UN policies and programs in supporting women in conflict and post conflict societies. In this context it’s essential that our work focuses not only on protecting women but on empowering them to participate fully in all the processes that affect them. UN Peacekeeping implements this mandate primarily through gender advisers at headquarters and in the field.

Our first gender advisers were deployed to Kosovo and East Timor in 1999 and as mandated we now have them on the ground in all 16 peacekeeping missions. Their core functions, as articulated in our Gender Equality in UN Peacekeeping Operations Policy (2010) are to provide technical guidance and support to senior management of the peacekeeping mission; to mainstream gender issues into all civil, military and police components; and to build the capacity of personnel to guide the gender mainstreaming efforts.

After a recent DPKO internal evaluation of our work on WPS, it’s clear that the UN has put an impressive amount of effort into putting policies, guidance and training programs and materials in place to support implementation of this mandate. Unfortunately, what remains is a general lack of understanding of why gender mainstreaming is important and how it adds value to our broader peacekeeping mandate and responsibilities.

Firstly, there is a lack of leadership on this mandate from senior management in UN peacekeeping. This isn’t surprising given the competing priorities faced by the leaders of peacekeeping missions. Secondly, the level of gender adviser posts and their structural location within our missions have reduced the access of our Senior Gender Advisers to mission leadership and created a kind of ‘gender enclave’ rather than supporting the mainstream effort.

We have had a high turnover of gender advisers, have an under resourced Gender Unit at headquarters and had posts removed or reallocated in our missions. These factors have also led to a lack of perceived career path for gender advisers. Due in part to our inability to show the value-added of the WPS mandate to the overall mandate of the missions, it’s sometimes perceived as a technical/niche area and not the responsibility of all mission staff. This is problematic because of the positive impact that our WPS work could potentially have on issues like community access, information gathering and analysis, and early warning mechanisms.

Nevertheless, there are several examples of what we know works. All our missions now hold ‘Global Open Days’ on WPS every year, where the head of mission reaches out to local women’s groups across the country to give high level political attention to their concerns and to enhance their roles. In Darfur for example, at the most recent Open Day women from four states came together to create an institutional mechanism to support the implementation by government of Resolution 1325 and create a women’s protection network.

The Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) Forward Looking Gender Strategy (2014-2018), combined with Resolution 2242 and a series of high-level peace and security reviews have generated new momentum and strengthened the hand of those working to improve our work on gender within the Secretariat. DPKO leadership will now elevate the Senior Gender Adviser at UN headquarters to the office of our Chief of Staff to facilitate regular access to both Under Secretary-Generals. We have finalised standardised gender reporting training materials and are developing gender-based conflict analysis training for mission planners to ensure a gender lens is applied from the start-up of our missions.

In the field, our Senior Gender Advisers now report directly to our Heads of Mission. Gender targets will now be used as specific indicators of individual performance of all senior managers. Now all gender officer posts that have been mandated must be budgeted for in missions and filled with appropriate staff.

At the UN we now focus on five entry points for WPS: through policies such as one addressing gender-specific conflict analysis; through women’s participation in post conflict decision making processes; through personnel by creating an enabling environment to achieve 50-50 gender parity; through protection by ensuring that all UN action takes into account the protection of women and girls; and finally through partnership that can broaden mainstreaming efforts and make our impact more sustainable.

This article is part of a series on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ that The Strategist will publish over coming weeks in recognition of International Women’s Day 2017.

As today marks International Women’s Day, it’s timely to reflect on the Australian government’s commitments and priorities in implementing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda’s international policy framework of eight UN Security Council resolutions. The agenda supports the participation of women in peace and security governance, the protection of women’s rights and their bodies, and the prevention of violence.

Historically, the ‘prevention’ pillar of the agenda has been somewhat overlooked in favour of close and sustained engagement with participation activities (ensuring that women are involved in peace negotiations, for example, or that women are represented in national security organisations) and protection activities (ensuring that women are protected from sexualised and gender-based violence). Where prevention has featured, it has predominantly related to the prevention of sexual violence in conflict.

This is changing, however, as new priorities in the WPS agenda emerge. The most recent resolution, UNSCR 2242, brings counterterrorism and countering violent extremism (CT/CVE) into conversation with WPS initiatives. The resolution therefore articulates violence prevention in a new and different way: the prevention of terrorism and violent extremism becomes central to the women, peace and security agenda.

Three paragraphs of UNSCR 2242 are devoted to explaining how the WPS and CT/CVE agendas could align better, with priority given to mainstreaming gender in the operations of the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) and the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) (OP 11). The resolution also calls for better data collection in this sphere, and ‘the participation and leadership of women and women’s organisations in developing strategies to counter terrorism and violent extremism which can be conducive to terrorism’ (OP 13).

In the Australian context, we need to explore what that means both for our commitments under the WPS agenda (which are captured in the Australian National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security 2012–2018) and for our CT/CVE activities, not least because the government is now beginning the process of consultation around the next iteration of the National Action Plan for launch in 2019. It’s important that this next NAP reflects the integration of WPS and CT/CVE, but it’s also equally important that this integration is thoughtful, sophisticated, and informed by consultation with communities and community organisations across Australia.

There have been a number of concerns raised about the creeping integration of CVE with WPS. Those include issues with CVE strategies and initiatives articulated by many working in this field, including cases where program initiatives are poorly specified and poorly understood, addressing neither women, peace, security, nor violent extremism adequately. There’s also often a lack of appropriate gender training for practitioners engaged in CVE program delivery both within the national context and overseas, and a lack of confidence in government and a lack of trust between community groups and state actors. The government needs to state clearly what programs are intended to achieve, to ensure comprehensive gender training and to engage in extensive community consultation, such that community groups are active participants not only in delivery but also in formulation of initiatives.

A number of issues are raised within communities of scholars and practitioners about the alignment between CVE and WPS. Gender equality initiatives must be consistently applied and not bartered to appease certain political actors and to achieve specific political ends. Further, there’s often too little attention paid to the gender dynamics of radicalisation and, specifically, to the radicalisation of women and a lack of understanding of the various and often conflicted roles that women play in counterterrorism and countering violent extremism. The Australian government would do well to leverage the extensive research expertise in this sphere, both within and beyond Australia, to ensure that plans and initiatives are evidence-based and pay due attention to gender as a power dynamic as well as the roles and representation of women within the domain of CT/CVE.

It’s critical that women are neither instrumentalised, nor put at risk, in the service of CT/CVE. As advocates of the Women, Peace and Security agenda have consistently reminded us, the WPS agenda isn’t about ‘making war safe for women’. Prioritising CT/CVE within WPS in Australia, both immediately and in the next iteration of the National Action Plan, mustn’t pay lip service to the roles and representation of women but truly value women’s experiences and reflect the concerns of communities and community organisations if it is to be effective.