From “Saved” to Savior: How Women’s Agency Shapes International Interventions
by Bianca Orfila-Molinet
School of Public and International Affairs
This paper examines how gendered assumptions shape the design and outcomes of international interventions. Drawing on feminist international relations scholarship, particularly Cynthia Enloe’s concept of the “global victim,” it argues that portraying women as passive recipients of protection rather than as political actors distorts intervention strategies and undermines their effectiveness. Through an analysis of peacekeeping operations, democracy-promotion efforts, and post-conflict negotiations, the paper demonstrates how gender binaries influence who is protected, who is excluded, and whose knowledge is valued. The cases of Srebrenica and the Afghanistan peace negotiations illustrate how rigid assumptions about men as combatants and women as victims contributed to policy failures and exclusionary outcomes. In contrast, the implementation of Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan reveals how recognizing women as strategic actors can improve intelligence gathering and local engagement. The paper further evaluates the Women, Peace and Security agenda, arguing that meaningful implementation—particularly in restrictive political contexts—requires institutional redesign and locally rooted participation rather than symbolic inclusion. Ultimately, the paper contends that recognizing women as political decision-makers is not merely a normative goal but a strategic necessity for producing more effective and legitimate international interventions.
international interventions; peacekeeping missions, post-conflict peace negotiations, humanitarian aid, and democracy-promotion efforts led by international actors
In international politics, women are frequently portrayed as passive recipients of aid, protection, or rescue rather than as political actors capable of shaping outcomes. Feminist scholars have long criticized this framing for obscuring women’s agency and reinforcing gendered hierarchies in global governance. In the opening chapter of Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, Cynthia Enloe refers to women as the “global victim.” She suggests that women’s roles in global politics are persistently associated with receiving rather than shaping power; positioning them as non-agentic and passive rather than as decision-makers (Enloe 2014). Enloe goes on to state that “women are forever being acted upon… Rarely are women seen as the explainers or the reshapers of the world. Rarely are they made visible as thinkers and actors” (Enloe 2014). This assumption becomes especially consequential in international interventions, where outcomes often depend on whether women are treated as political actors or simply as populations in need of protection. Contemporary efforts may succeed where earlier missions failed by adopting UNSCR 1325’s emphasis on women’s participation. Thus, how global actors understand women’s agency, and whether they meaningfully include women in peacekeeping, negotiations, and aid efforts, can directly shape political outcomes. Beyond academic debates, international interventions affect millions of lives and determine whether post-conflict societies move toward stability or renewed violence. When women are excluded from these processes, interventions risk misreading local dynamics and reinforcing the very inequalities they claim to address. Understanding women as political actors is therefore not only a normative concern, but a practical one.
Past attempts at international interventions demonstrate that outcomes vary significantly depending on how nations and institutions engage with local populations. Murdie and Davis (2010) found that peacekeeping interventions after civil wars can both improve and worsen human rights in the host state. For instance, missions with humanitarian objectives or mediation efforts improve rights, while others may ultimately restrict freedoms (Murdie & Davis 2010). In the sphere of international aid, Mann and Brechenmacher (2024) note that the global aid ecosystem is evolving in response to movements toward women’s political inclusion. International assistance programs increasingly include women’s political engagement, mobilization in civil society, and participation as candidates as guidelines for states deserving of receiving aid (Mann & Brechenmacher 2024, 13). They also note that, despite seeing gender equality as a requirement for states to receive aid, democracy-aid institutions remain male dominated, and cite gender inclusion as a secondary goal rather than a primary goal (Mann & Brechenmacher 2024, 34).
Gender norms that frame men as combatants and women as victims can actively undermine the effectiveness of international interventions, sometimes with fatal consequences. Carpenter (2003) states that, of all war-affected noncombatants worldwide, those most at risk of summary execution are adult civilian males. In the case of the Srebrenica massacre, men were systematically separated from others and killed. The United Nations and evacuation groups did not deem this demographic as vulnerable, and despite the Srebrenican men’s desire to evacuate with the women and children, they were left behind. A gender constructivist approach that abandoned the idea of women as victims and men as actors may have aided the intervention and reduced fatalities.
As for more recent cases, the Afghanistan peace negotiations brokered in the 2020s are another example where women’s inclusion was pushed aside. Jenny Nordberg, author of The Underground Girls of Kabul, writes, “for the foreigners ‘to leave with some sense of honor intact’ and a semblance of at least a ‘dirty peace’… some kind of agreement would ideally be brokered with the militant opposition” (Nordberg 2014, 246). Peace talks, which almost entirely excluded women (Rahmaty 2021), also excluded “soft” issues, such as the rights of women (Nordberg 2014, 246). Once again, women were not seen as agents of their own state’s peace talks, and the Women, Peace and Security agenda of 2000 was ignored for a faster, cheaper exit strategy. As Nordberg wrote about the foreigners existing, “I do what we all do. I get on the plane and just leave” (Nordberg 2014, 3).
For women all over the world, however, there is no plane jetting them back to democracy or safety. In Afghanistan, women were excluded as legitimate political participants, and intervention strategies mirrored this marginalization. Women politicians are seen as the bearers of “women’s issues,” Nordberg writes about a local elected official in Kabul, Azita, who says it frustrates her that foreigners call on her to discuss ‘women’s issues’, but ignore her expertise on how the state should be run, an issue important to both women and men (Nordberg 2014, 120). By casting them primarily as victims, policymakers overlooked the complex ways Afghan women navigated and shaped political life. For instance, Dyvik (2014) noted that the implementation of Female Engagement Teams (FETs) in Afghanistan as a tool for population-centered counterinsurgency uncovered Afghan women’s agency. Afghan women, especially the heads of households, were frequently key informants to U.S. soldiers that previously had no bearing over what was happening in the occupied villages. Not only were FETs showing the agency of U.S. women, but also the power of Afghan women. The effectiveness of Female Engagement Teams illustrates that when interventions are designed around the assumption that women are political actors, they produce more accurate intelligence and more sustainable engagement.
A similar view must be adopted when addressing women in conservative political-religious movements like those prominent in Afghanistan. Ben Shitrit (2013) finds that “pious women experience agency in acts of submission rather than in resistance,” and “the association of agency with emancipatory desire and action is an expression of a patently Western tradition” (Ben Shitrit 2013, 81). Rejecting gender norms involves a conscious decision to think outside of isolated Western ideologies and accepting women’s agency in different forms. Taken together, these cases reveal that gendered assumptions do not merely shape discourse; they structure who is protected, who is excluded, and ultimately whose lives are valued in intervention design.
An important step in changing the global view of women is implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda in its entirety. This means implementing not only the articles about women as victims of violence, but also those involving women in peace negotiations and security processes. Afghanistan completed its implementation of its first National Action Plan for UNSCR 1325 in 2018. However, implementation faced significant challenges, including budget constraints, lack of political will, and limited capacity (Yari 2025, 4). Future attempts at implementation should recruit local women to identify community issues and unique implement solutions.
The future of international interventions depends on the changes made to women’s places on a global stage. Past interventions, such as those in Srebrenica and Afghanistan, herald a warning to decision-makers, encouraging them to position women in roles beyond the victim. When women are meaningfully included in negotiation, security planning, and governance design, interventions are more likely to produce durable and locally legitimate outcomes. In contrast, when women are reduced to passive beneficiaries, it is to both women and men’s detriment. Brechenmacher (2025) identifies newly popularized anti-gender ideology as a primary actor in the dismantling of the global gender-conscious infrastructure carefully constructed over the past two decades. However, Brechenmacher (2025) raises four directions for action: be prepared to make the case for gender as a mainstream issue, improve existing messaging, build and support locally rooted campaigns, and include men in gender equality work. To effectively counter backlash against gender equality, even in the realm of international interventions, local women must be treated as political decision-makers. To move forward, intervention frameworks must be redesigned to remove structural barriers to women’s political participation and to institutionalize their inclusion in decision-making. While these strategies offer a useful framework, their success depends on local political conditions. In highly restrictive contexts such as Afghanistan, progress may be uneven, but locally rooted campaigns and community-level engagement are more likely to succeed than externally imposed reforms. Without recognizing women as political actors within their own societies, these directions risk remaining aspirational rather than transformative.
References
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