Bureaucratizing Women’s Security: Côte dʼIvoire’s Security Sector Reform

Security sector reform, a process to better ensure security for the state and its people, has been incorporated into the implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda in many post-conflict states as critical to enhancing women’s security. Côte dʼIvoire, the first conflict-affected country to develop a National Action Plan (NAP) to implement the WPS agenda, localized the agenda by emphasizing security sector reform. This paper argues that this is a response to international priorities in women’s security, namely an emphasis on sexualized violence and giving primacy to achieving easily measurable indicators, all the while privileging mechanisms of traditional security. Using interviews with representatives from women’s community organizations, the Ivorian government, and UN officials, as well as participant observation of public and semi-public conferences and meetings, this paper concludes that Côte dʼIvoire is relying on an “add and stir” form of gender mainstreaming. This research demonstrates that women’s security, with the collusion of national and international actors, ultimately has become a bureaucratized form of security, relying heavily on protection and inclusion into the existing governmental and security systems, without being transformative and attending to the full range of security needs and human rights.