Women’s Executive Leadership and UN Peacekeeping Missions

• In Event: Gender and the Executive Worldwide: Voters, Candidates, and National Leaders

Abstract

What impact does women’s executive leadership have on state involvement in UN peacekeeping missions? We aim to explore a few common explanations for state commitment to peacekeeping operations, taking leadership into account for the first time. In particular, past literature has focused on state-based explanations that exclude individual leadership from the equation. For example, past research has overly relied on security explanations for committing troops. However, we posit that due to factors such as the political double bind, gendered leadership may matter in this decision calculus. Specifically, we argue that women leaders may be more likely to commit to UN peacekeeping missions that are particularly focused on humanitarian concerns as opposed to strictly security issues. In particular, we place this research in the growing literature on women leaders, the double bind, and foreign policy decision-making.

Authors

• Courtney Burns, Bucknell University

• Kate Perry, Georgia Southern University