Keywords

Introduction

Since the unanimous adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1325 in October 2000, global efforts to promote and implement the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda have been ongoing. The resolution marked a pivotal moment by acknowledging the disproportionate impact of armed conflict on women and emphasizing the need for their inclusion in all stages of peace processes. Subsequent UN resolutionsFootnote 1 have further expanded the WPS agenda and solidified it as a cornerstone of global efforts for sustainable peace. Parallel to this UN engagement, donor countries, especially the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) member countries, have increased their efforts to contribute to the implementation of the WPS agenda through their development assistance (OECD, 2020).

Germany and South Korea have participated in the diffusion of the WPS agenda through the Group of Friends of Women, Peace and Security (WPS), an informal network of 66 Member States and the European Union, established in 2001 under the active leadership of Canada. As a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for the 2019–2020 term, and through its role within the European Union (EU) during its presidency, Germany led the efforts to support a comprehensive approach to the implementation of SCR 1325 and the adoption of the follow-up resolutions (Popovic, 2020). During Germany’s Presidency in April 2019, Resolution 2467 was successfully adopted, calling for victims of sexual violence to be supported and perpetrators to be called to account (Birkenkötter, 2021; Federal Foreign Office, 2021; Fröhlich, 2023). South Korea, which will serve as one of the UN Security Council members in 2024 and 2025, identifies the WPS agenda as one of four primary areas of concern on which South Korea will lead discussions at the Council.

At the national level, Germany and South Korea have adopted their National Action Plans (NAPs) on implementing SCR 1325 using a whole-of-government approach, and development cooperation ministries and agencies have participated in implementing these NAPs. Their engagements have further increased since both countries introduced their own initiatives, such as the Action with Women and Peace Initiative in South Korea in 2018 and the Feminist Foreign Policy and the Feminist Development Policy of Germany since 2023.

This chapter explores how Germany and South Korea have responded to the recent wave of integrating the WPS agenda into development cooperation over the past decade by analysing development cooperation components in their NAPs on implementing SCR 1325, in force for the periods of 2021–2024 and 2021–2023, respectively.

Implementation of the WPS Agenda at a National Level

The concept of gender equality in peace and security was rarely incorporated in the narrative of the Security Council before the first debate on “women, peace and security” that took place in 2000 (Swaine, 2009). Such inception of the WPS agenda at the Security Council is attributed to the influence of international women’s rights organizations as “norm-entrepreneurs” (Park, 2021). These groups have led the formation of international norms on peace and security from a feminist perspective by bringing to the public attention the systemic sexual crimes against women that occurred in armed conflicts in the 1990s, e.g. in Kosovo, the former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, and by advocating for the adoption of such norms at key international gatherings, e.g. the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna and the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing.

The resulting resolution from the debate, SCR 1325, has formally placed the issue of gender equality within the remit of efforts to address issues of conflict and peace, laying out four central engagement pillars: prevention, participation, protection and relief and recovery (George & Shepherd, 2016; Tryggestad, 2009). The resolution emphasizes the need to integrate gendered and inclusive approaches to sustainable peace and development while highlighting the continued targeting of women for egregious abuse in conflict situations (Popovic, 2020).

Efforts to implement SCR 1325 were accelerated when Kofi Annan, the then UN Secretary-General, asked member states to elaborate NAPs on implementing SCR 1325 in 2004 (Barrow, 2016; Jung & Tsujisaka, 2019). Since the first adoption by Denmark in 2005, NAPs have been used as a significant policy instrument to advance the implementation of the WPS agenda at the national level. NAPs set out the governments’ commitments and priorities for the WPS agenda, present the human, technical and financial resources necessary to implement their plans, and have been in operation for five time periods over the past 20 years, as shown in Table 5.1. As of July 2023, 107 member states, representing 55% of the UN member states, including 28 OECD DAC members (not including Greece and Hungary), had adopted a NAP (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 2023). Although many countries have yet to publish their follow-up plans since establishing their first NAP, Germany and South Korea have continued to develop and implement their NAPs since 2013 and 2014, respectively.

Table 5.1 Global diffusion of National Action Plans (NAPs) for the implementation of UN SCR 1325
Full size table

These national efforts to implement SCR 1325 have been primarily through foreign and security policies (George & Shepherd, 2016; Muehlenhoff, 2022; Shepherd, 2016). For most donor countries, their NAPs have been developed with a focus on supporting fragile and conflict-affected states through development cooperation, recognizing that the objectives set out in SCR 1325 and subsequent resolutions are most relevant to ministries and agencies responsible for development cooperation (Popovic, 2020). As a result, bilateral ODA from DAC members focused on gender equality in fragile contexts has considerably increased, from USD 2.6 billion per year in 2002/03 to USD 10.3 billion in 2012/13 and USD 20.5 billion in 2020/2021 (OECD CRS, 2023).

Germany’s Outward-Looking NAPs to Implement Women, Peace and Security

In the case of Germany, the Federal Government has been publishing its NAPs to implement SCR 1325 since 2013, relatively late compared to other European countries. However, Germany is still considered one of the UN Member States that initiated its efforts to implement SCR 1325 at the national level at an early stage, as the German government published three reports to document its implementation of the resolution in 2004, 2007 and 2010, prior to the publication of its first NAP.

Currently, the fourth German NAP (2021–2024) is in force, and it emphasizes that the WPS agenda is one of the horizontal policy objectives of the German government, with the Federal Foreign Office (AA), Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ), Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection (BMJV) and Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) participating in its implementation (Federal Foreign Office, 2021). The involvement of BMFSFJ, BMI and BMJV, whose primary policy domain is mainly in the domestic sphere, proves the fact that the German NAP covers not only the protection of women in conflict-related settings but also domestic concerns such as the protection and reintegration of refugees and migrants in the country. Thus, in comparison to other donor countries, Germany is considered one of the best examples of a well-balanced application of both internal and external objectives in the application of WPS (Westermann, 2018).

Notwithstanding this “whole of government” approach, in practice, 31 of the 46 indicators in the six priority areas—crisis prevention, participation, protection and support; humanitarian assistance; crisis management and reconstruction; strengthening the women; peace and security agenda; and increasing institutional integration and capacities—of the fourth NAP (2021–2024) are being implemented by BMZ, indicating that the German NAP is primarily engaged externally with development cooperation efforts. In this sense, the German NAP recognizes that the German missions abroad in fragile contexts and (post-) conflict countries have a crucial responsibility to effectively drive the implementation of the WPS agenda, as do the missions in multilateral locations.

Germany’s outward-looking focus of the WPS agenda is expected to be further strengthened under Olaf Scholz’s current centre-left coalition government. Following the introduction of policy guidelines on its feminist foreign policy (FFP) and feminist development policy (FDP), as announced in its 2021 coalition agreement, the new FFP guidelines were launched by the Federal Foreign Office on 1 March 2023 (Federal Foreign Office, 2023). In the guidelines, the implementation and strengthening of the WPS agenda is identified as a priority for the multilateral engagement of Germany, especially as one of the key agendas in Germany’s candidacy for a non-permanent seat on the Security Council for 2027–2028. With the financial commitment to allocate 85% of bilateral ODA to projects that include gender equality and women’s empowerment by 2025, Germany’s support for implementing the WPS in conflict-related settings is expected to increase.

South Korea’s Inward Focus on Its NAPs

South Korea, in contrast to its active engagement in the promotion of the WPS agenda at the UN circle, including its participation as a founding member of the Group of Friends of Women, Peace and Security since 2001, has been rather sluggish in its attempts to embrace the WPS agenda domestically. Its first NAP was only launched in 2014 in response to a strong push from civil society through the National Assembly (Park, 2021). Women Making Peace, a Korean women’s rights group, first launched the 1325 Peace Club in December 2006 to advocate the adoption of the NAP, but it did not achieve much success over the years (Kang, 2013). Then, in 2011, Choi Yong-hee, a chair of the Women and Family Affairs Committee at the National Assembly, passed a resolution calling for the government to draft its NAP with the support of 32 National Assembly members. In response to such demands, the Korean government led a number of consultation group meetings in preparation for drafting the NAP in 2012 (MOGEF, 2021). Shortly after the series of discussions with a small group of experts and government officials, South Korea completed drafting its first NAP and submitted it to the UN in 2014 (Yoon & Liljeström, 2022).

Following the adoption of its first NAP under the leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (MOGEF) was designated to lead the government-wide efforts to draft and implement the second (2018–2020) and third (2021–2023) NAPs. This shift in lead ministry reflects the recognition of the necessity to emphasize WPS implementation within the country. In the case of the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), a government agency dedicated to implementing South Korea’s grant aid programmes, it has participated since the implementation of the second NAP in 2018 with eight ministries—Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (MOGEF), Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), Ministry of Education (MOE), Ministry of Unification (MOU), Ministry of Justice (MOJ), Ministry of National Defence (MND) and Ministry of the Interior and Safety (MOIS)—and one agency, the Korean National Police Agency (KNPA). Of the 24 action plans in the five areas being implemented—prevention, participation, protection, relief and recovery—and the monitoring of the implementation of the third NAP (2021–2023), only seven are being undertaken by KOICA.

This differs from most donor countries, including Germany, where the foreign ministry takes the lead in drafting the NAP, and ministries and agencies dealing with development cooperation are mostly responsible for implementation and monitoring. South Korea’s third NAP (2021–2023) recognizes South Korea as a contributor to development assistance and mentions expanding development cooperation efforts for women and girls in conflict-related settings. The plan places considerable emphasis on the domestic context of South Korea, a country that has experienced wartime sexual violence and human rights violations from the 1930s till the end of the Second World War, as evidenced by the so-called “comfort women” who were victimized by the Japanese imperialist military (Barrow, 2016; Yoon & Liljeström, 2022). Since the Korean government considers itself as a country in conflict, where the Korean Peninsula remains divided into North and South, it has been taking a step beyond adopting the WPS agenda within its defence and foreign policy, as other donor countries such as Germany have done, and has also incorporated it in its unification policy (Yoon & Liljeström, 2022). In this regard, the National Unification Advisory Council (NUAC), the presidential consultative body in the field of unification, has been involved as one of the government agencies since the third NAP, and activities related to seeking “avenues for fostering inter-Korean cooperation on WPS and promote exchange” and taking “measures to safeguard the human rights of North Korean women defectors” are included in the document. These elements suggest that the third NAP was drafted under the Moon Jae-in administration, reflecting the progressive side’s tradition of focusing on strengthening ties with North Korea. As there has been no substantive inter-Korean dialogue since the US–North Korea summit in Hanoi 2019 ended without an agreement, most of the related action plans have yet to be realized.

Future Prospects

Over the coming years, the relevance of development cooperation within Germany’s implementation of the WPS agenda is expected to be further enhanced with the launch of feminist foreign policy (FFP) and feminist development policy (FDP), both of which have been framed in close consultation with civil society, parliamentarians and academics. In terms of its scope and ambition, Germany’s initiative is well ahead of the group of governments that have explicitly adopted or declared a feminist perspective in their foreign and development cooperation policy since 2014, and is anticipated to take on the leading role of this group, replacing Sweden, which abandoned its groundbreaking feminist foreign policy under its new right-wing government in 2022.

Interestingly, South Korea is also likely to expand its commitment to integrating development cooperation efforts within its WPS implementation. However, this may not at all be driven by a desire related to mainstream feminist perspectives in foreign and development cooperation policy, as in Germany, but rather by somewhat coincidental political circumstances.

Given the current Yoon Suk-yeol administration’s hawkish stance on North Korea, South Korea’s fourth NAP, which is being formulated by the soon-to-be abolished Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, is anticipated to weaken the emphasis on WPS implementation in the peacebuilding process on the Korea Peninsula, which was highlighted in the previous NAP, drafted during the Moon administration. Instead, in light of the current administration’s self-identification as a global pivotal state and its UN Security Council membership scheduled for 2024–2025, development cooperation efforts within the fourth NAP to implement the WPS agenda are expected to intensify, including increased support for victims of gender-based violence (GBV) in conflict-related settings, and financial contribution to the UN’s activities related to WPS.

As a result, the expected paradox is that the Yoon administration, which is retrogressing decades of progress in gender equality policies in South Korea, is positioning itself as a proponent of the WPS agenda in the international community, and such contradiction is a reflection of the international community’s expectations of South Korea’s foreign policy over the long run.