Deployed to the Sidelines: Analyzing Opportunities for Women’s Meaningful Participation in Peacekeeping

Abstract

Increasing women’s participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations (UNPKOs) has been a central focus of the WPS Agenda for over two decades. Despite some progress, women still make up less than 10% of troops deployed to UN missions and face significant barriers (Alchin et al., 2018; UN Peacekeeping, 2025). As such, there has been heightened emphasis on the importance of increasing women's meaningful participation in UNPKOs, but what this means in practice is unclear. Thus, my research explores how women’s meaningful participation in UNPKOs can be measured. Utilizing critical feminist analysis, this research advances meaningful participation as an operationalizable concept and advances a novel method for measuring it in peace operations: The Meaningful Participation Measurement (MPM) Framework. Using the MONUSCO peacekeeping mission as a case study to test the utility of the MPM Framework, the results revealed novel insights into opportunities and barriers to women’s meaningful participation in the mission.