Conclusion

This concluding chapter discusses how intervener cultures interact with the broad range of factors that challenge and undermine the effectiveness of peace operations, including by giving rise to the perpetration of sexual misconduct against local communities. In light of this, it details the key insights this book has revealed about the nature and impacts of sexual misconduct by interveners in peace operations and suggests how the international community might better address this issue and its complex, interlinked implications in the future. The chapter also reflects on the major shortcomings of policy on sexual exploitation and abuse to date, including the individualization of sexual exploitation and abuse, which relegates responses primarily to conduct and discipline policies rather than addressing the broader and systemic issues at play. It then considers the extent to which recent policy shifts might avoid replicating past mistakes in terms of sexual exploitation and abuse policy. Ultimately, recognizing the mutually reinforcing ways in which sexual exploitation and abuse by interveners undermines peacekeeping and peacebuilding outcomes and developing an effective and robust response to such misconduct and other interlinked peacekeeping challenges based on that understanding is crucial to the pursuit of global peace, order, and justice.

Legitimacy in Crisis

This chapter focuses on the macro- and institutional-level impacts of sexual exploitation and abuse. It shows that sexual misconduct in individual missions has far-reaching impacts that reduce international capacities to engage effectively in peace operations and diminish the perceived legitimacy of the international community engaged in peacekeeping and peacebuilding, thereby undermining the international community's capacity to pursue the broader aspirational goals that animate peacekeeping. Sexual misconduct also seeds conflict between different organizational or peacekeeping units as a result of perceived misbehaviors and undermines the morale of peacekeepers and humanitarians. This can result in reduced financial and other support for peace operations and related work and provide fodder for anti-intervention campaigners. Tracking the international responses to the 2015 peacekeeper sexual abuse scandal in the Central African Republic and the 2018 Oxfam sexual exploitation scandal in Haiti, the chapter also explores the global political implications of such scandals.

Making Matters Worse

This chapter investigates the micro- and mission-level impacts of sexual exploitation and abuse perpetrated by interveners in peace operations on the international community's capacity to fulfill its goals related to security, stability, and peacebuilding in postconflict contexts. These impacts operate on three levels: the individual and community level, the structural level, and the operational level. One fairly obvious conclusion arising from this analysis is that, in perpetrating sexual exploitation and abuse, interveners commit human rights violations, consolidate structures and processes that facilitate further exploitation and abuse, and spark conflict with actors who object to such behaviors. Thus, these outcomes are not in line with general expectations of the impacts peacekeepers should have on local populations and host states. Sexual exploitation and abuse is a significant source of mistrust between local communities and the international intervention, particularly as it intersected with other behaviors that amplified and exploited the power imbalance between international interveners and local communities.