Bio:
Jennifer Bond is a professor at the University of Ottawa and University of Michigan faculties of law, holds degrees in law, literature, and business, completed her graduate work at the Yale Law School as a John Peters Humphrey Fellow in International Human Rights Law, and has been called to the Bars of Ontario and British Columbia. Jennifer has served with the United Nations Refugee Agency in Damascus, Syria; is founder and current co-director of the Refugee Interview Support Project; and sits on the national executive of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers. In 2011, she was named a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, where she is affiliated with the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law. In 2012, Jennifer will author the expert Background Study for the 2013 Michigan Guidelines on International Refugee Protection.
Title of paper:
‘Securing Consistency for Consistent Security: Gender and the Responsibility to Protect
Abstract:
Over the past decade, the international community has acknowledged that traditional notions of conflict and protection must be re-visited if true human security is to be realized. Consistent with this recognition both the responsibility to protect (R2P) and the women, peace, and security agendas challenge the status quo and offer new perspectives from which to approach responses to conflict. Unfortunately, the former was developed without consideration of the latter, and a tremendous opportunity to benefit from years of experience and expertise was thus missed.
This paper demonstrates that while recent discourse surrounding the responsibility to protect suggests some increased awareness that conflict affects men and women differently, there remains a significant disconnect between the development of this framework and the ever-growing body of work on the gendered nature of peace and security issues. Identification of this ongoing chasm is accompanied by two simple observations: first, that this renders the responsibility to protect inconsistent with other international commitments and priorities; and second, that incorporation of the links between gender and conflict will improve the ability of the responsibility to protect to afford true protection.This presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Laurel Sherret, forthcoming in The Global Responsibility to Protect (Special Issue, May 2012) and The Routledge Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect (Frazer Egerton and Andy Knight, eds., Routledge, 2012) and originally published as ‘A Sight for Sore Eyes: Bringing Gender Vision to the Responsibility to Protect Framework,’ United Nations INSTRAW (2005).