Gender awareness has been recognized as critical in sustainable peace efforts, and gender mainstreaming has become a natural practice in peace projects. While gender has long been equated with focus on women, the inclusion of men has increased. The concept of militarized masculinity has gained recognition, where exposure to the military institution is believed to foster certain gendered norms. The construction of these militarized masculinities has been a prominent focus in previous research, where capability of violence is apparent, and they are often found to undermine sustainable peace efforts. Less attention has been given to how these norms endure outside of the military institution. This thesis seeks to explore this question by studying five Namibian veterans who after the independence war moved on to become prominent politicians, which is argued to provide a least likely case for norm change. Through a qualitative content analysis, the veterans are studied during their entire time in the Namibian parliament. The study finds that the masculinity norms of the veterans developed and adapted to peace time, but still remained militarized. A new ideal type of militarized masculinity is formulated based on the findings, the Nation Protector, where leadership, bravery and patriotism are central, together with ideas of gender equality and peace. The study thus provide evidence that militarized masculinities may change outside of the military institution, but that this change is slow.

During the last decade reports of international personnel perpetrating acts of sexual exploitation and abuse against the very population in which they are mandated to protect are a disturbing outcome of some peace operations provided by the United Nations. Sexual exploitation and abuse have been a problem since the first peacekeeping operations in the beginning of 1990’s, however it was not until 2004 when the media reported disturbing acts of sexual abuse of children by French peacekeepers that the whole worlds eyes turned to these claims. This thesis will deal with a sensitive and relevant topic, sexual exploitation and abuse by United Nations peacekeepers. The purpose of this research is to understand and explain why United Nations peacekeepers are involved in the horrors which they seek to address.

When Canada took on the leadership role of the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team (K-PRT) in Afghanistan, the liberation of women and children via multi-departmental collaboration was promoted by the government as a critical goal of the operation. Research from the fields of public administration, international development, and critical security studies hypothesizes that collaborative approaches to governance, particularly in fragile states, ensures that greater resources are available to address human rights issues, including gender equality. It is therefore surprising that the gendered implications of Canada’s collaborative governance commitments within the K-PRT have not been deeply explored. Through a feminist frame analysis, informed by critical and post-structural feminist theory, this dissertation asks whether the Canadian collaborative approach permits more attention to be paid to policy and programming on gender equality. Framing the case of the K-PRT from a feminist perspective, this dissertation identifies the hegemony of masculinity within the policy context that guided the Canadian collaborative approaches in Kandahar, highlighting how international guidelines for collaboration legitimized the leadership of the military and instrumentalized gender for militarized purposes. It also exposes the masculine structure of the K-PRT, identifying how the design of the PRT favoured the might of the military, and presented the exceptionalism of women as the only marker of gender. Finally, this dissertation highlights the narrative of masculinity that is threaded throughout the K-PRT, working to normalize the militarization of civilian departments and actors implicated within the Canadian collaborative approach. The application of a gender lens to the case of the K-PRT reveals the necessity of feminist analysis of collaborative approaches, as these are increasingly being seen as best practices for addressing state fragility worldwide.

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The thesis aims to examine how gender structures are portrayed in the Swedish Armed Forces' advertising campaigns before and after 2018, because that is when the conscription became gender neutral. Furthermore, the thesis will discuss the potential consequences of these portrayals. To do so the methodology of the study consists of a critical discourse analysis complimented by a semiotic approach. The main finding suggests that the films prior to 2018 to some extent reproduce male-dominated discourses of how a soldier should be and reinforce traditional gender structures. In contrast, the films from 2018 and onwards challenge these dominant discourses by including more women and other signs that are not typically coded as masculine. It is assumed that this will lead to more women being recruited, as the profession of a soldier is no longer perceived as being exclusively for men, and a more inclusive environment is introduced. These assumptions are based on previous research on gender structures in military institutions, which historically have been structured around male norms and values which force women in the military to adjust to patriarchal rules. The topic is important, as a gender-equal military is believed to lead to increased safety and efficiency, which is desirable for various reasons.

Women’s rights and female security is a growing concern in several conflicts around the world. In Congo, conflict-related violence has long been used as weapon and Congo has today become known as the “rape capital” beacuse of these war rapes. Further more, reports from South Sudan states that UN troops has ignored pleas for help by women being raped. United Nation Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 was implemented by the UN Security Council to combat conflict-related violence and add a gender perspective in UN Peacekeeping operations.  The aim of this thesis is to analyze the impact of UNSCR 1325 by comparing UN Peacekeeping operations’ mandates and actions before and after the resolution was implemented. The thesis will also analyse the UN’s action to eliminate conflict-based sexual violence and war rape. The peacekeeping operations that will be discussed are MINURSO (West Sahara) MONUSCO (Congo) and UNMISS (South Sudan). In order to do so, the theory of Female Security Studies [FSS] and Militarized Masculinity will be applied. In our thesis, the UN’s actions were found to be insufficient. The main factors resulting in this insufficiency was found to be the systematic failure to take the actions needed to implement UNSCR 1325, such as the increasing the number of female involvement in peacekeeping and peacebuilding processes. In large, the impact of UNSCR 1325 could have been bigger if the resolution had been implemented more efficiently. While the written changes were significant with the implementation of the resolution, these changes were not as visible among the actual actions taken in the peacekeeping operations in West Sahara, Congo and South Sudan.