UNDPKO Doing Gender

Since many years the United Nations have been working to integrate a gender perspective into their peace operations. But success is very slow. Even if the norm of „non-violence against women“ is a well established factor within the regime of peace operations, the equal representation of men and women within peacekeeping bureacracies (both at strategic UNDPKO-level as well as in the field) lacks behind. What are the reasons for the slow success? This paper goes beyond national arguments and tries to understand the practices and policies of the international bureacracies. The main argument is that especially the peacekeeping bureacracy of the United Nations is still highly masculine. Therefore gender-aspects are established selectively. To develop the argument I use sociological organisation theories and the concept of masculine peaceoperations.