Clare Hutchinson, NATO Special Representative for Women, Peace & Security

Here are three pieces of advice:

• Grow your confidence, believe in yourself, cancel out the negative, and ignore those who try to close you down.

• Be bold with who you are. Women have to speak their truths and speak their minds. 

• Women should support other women and have men as alliances in their fight against patriarchy.

CV in brief:

Education: Masters of International Relations and Masters of Research from New Castle University

Career Highlights: Served as the Senior Gender Adviser with the United Nations and now serves as the NATO Secretary General’s Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security

Exclusive interview by Deirdre Carbery, July 2020

What do you do? 

I am the NATO Secretary General’s Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and I am also Head of the newly established Unit for Human Security which sits in the NATO Secretary General’s Office. My role is two-fold; the first is to guide, support and facilitate the WPS Agenda across the Alliance from a political standpoint. Consequently,  I work with Ambassadors, Senior Political Leaders and leaders of NATO to make sure that we mainstream, we influence, we integrate gender perspectives across all policy, planning and operational activities and that we promote WPS (so that) it leads to full equality across the Alliance itself. I also work with individual nations, with our Allies and Partners, to help them promote and progress the WPS Agenda through their National Action Plans (NAPs) and other initiatives.

The second aspect to my role is on the Human Security side. We established the Human Security Unit to bring together all the different outlying areas and topics, which include; Children in Armed Conflict, Protection of Civilians, Human Trafficking, Conflict-Related Sexual Violence (CRSV), Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA) and Cultural Property Protection (CPP). These topics collectively make up NATO’s ‘Human Security Mandate’. Woven through all these areas is a gender perspective. Human Security is more protection focused while WPS is both protection and empowerment. 

How did your childhood inspire your early career path?

I have never been in the military but my father did serve in the Navy so I was aware of Security and Defence issues growing up. I always knew that my choice of career had to be something where I could talk a lot because I have many opinions and I like to share them largely and loudly with as many people as I can!! Starting out, I was very influenced by doing something in Media because I liked the idea of delving into things and exploring the world. I had a very curious mind and I’ve always felt that if you are curious about the world then you can do anything. From a young age, I was very aware of my insatiable curiosity to investigate and do more. I was also influenced by the network of strong women I had in my immediate and extended family. I have a formidable mother and both she and my grandmother provided me with powerful, inspiring role models. I call this line of strong women in my life my feminist sisterhood even though they might not see themselves as feminists per se. But they had jobs (because they had to) because they came from poor families and they needed to be in control of their money. My grandmother had the first motorbike in her village in the 1920s and it was simply because she had to get to work and it provided the cheapest means. They taught me valuable lessons about the importance of having my own money because to them, money equalled freedom. Growing up, my entire family stressed the importance of education. I was learning important life lessons but didn't realise at the time but I am able to reflect and appreciate what wonderful lessons these were. I am so grateful to have been born into a family who saw the importance of education and in the fiscal empowerment of women.

As I started to grow and experience more of the world, I was also filled with an innate sense that injustice, inequality and unfairness were just not OK. I came from the North of England, mining communities where many people were overlooked because they had a different accent or they came from a certain area – and that’s not acceptable. 

In 1991, my family moved to Canada and it was there that I got into the Media as a freelance journalist and reporter. I had my own Cable and radio shows where I introduced political topics.

What sparked your interest in leading projects that helped women and young people better utilise technology?

My career path and career progression have been heavily influenced by the role models in my life. I’ve been lucky to have wonderful male and female role models. One of my role models and mentors introduced me to the internet in 1992. At the time, I worked with a small startup called ‘Ingenia communications’ run by two women who were trying to bring the internet into the mainstream. We created the first website for the government of Canada, with a grey background and a clip art map. The internet was just a baby but I saw the potential in it for women so I started training women on how to use computers and how to use the internet. As Director of Comms, I was given the scope and budget to do some pro bono work. I realized women were terrified of using computers and so whenever anything happened women generally responded with “I’ve done something wrong” but men would respond with “there’s something wrong with the computer”. I realised that there was a gender disparity with how women internalise and how men externalise and how both genders see the world.

How did you get involved with the United Nations?

I was doing a research project in  1992 and I followed a group of women who were in Bosnia during the conflict. They were sending emails out to the world about what was happening and how women were being affected by the conflict. There were increasing reports of rape in conflict and I was outraged and disturbed with this. At the same time, it hit me that I knew nothing about the world and that I had come from a generally very protected background. Realising that there are women out there being raped as a tactic of war shook me to my core. I felt compelled to act.

I decided that I needed to educate myself more on the topics I was being exposed to so I went back to University to do a Masters Degree. I started looking at international politics from a feminist ethnography standpoint, looking at how women and men were reported on in the media and how the analysis was conducted by journalists. When we talk about a women politician, for example, a news article may reference ‘she wore a pantsuit and she has two children’, however, men are never defined by their gender or their family. They are defined by their credibility. 

The more I learnt, the more I wanted to know. Understanding gender, gender disparity and inequality became a passion for me. Through my Master’s Degree I focused on feminist political science and I completed my thesis on women terrorists. However at the time, there wasn’t a lot of research completed in this space.

I earned a scholarship to do a PHD and then had to do a second research masters so I decided to look at pre-conflict and early warning indicators.  I looked at how you can define a country by how it treats its women. I travelled to Kosovo as part of my research and worked with the UN as a volunteer on a domestic violence project and at the end of it, the UN offered me a job!

I stayed and worked in the UN for nearly two decades, setting the strategic development of WPS for the UN Department of Peacekeeping at Operational and Strategic levels.

I became more engaged and determined to make a change. I believe that I have a responsibility to work and act and to help those who don’t have the access, those who have been silenced or those who have not been given the same opportunities. This is a vocation. It is a passion and I know that this is what I’m supposed to do.

Describe a typical day for you?

I am an early riser; I get up at 0500AM and I’m in work by 0630AM. The early hours of the day are my favourite part, I get to read my emails, I get to think and I get to read new research articles. My morning is dominated with answering emails. Our mandate covers the whole of NATO, which includes defence investment, NATO’s planning and operational activities among others. I also try to create innovative projects and ideas around how we can really influence NATO. My team is writing a concept paper for an event on Cultural Property Protection and also working with the Focal Point for an annual NATO Award, we recently introduced, for the Division who has had the most success with integrating the WPS Agenda into their work. This year, we also have individual awards for staff across the Alliance who have really pushed the Agenda forward. Their purpose is to influence people to become more engaged on the issues. 

I really believe that you shouldn’t do something that you’re not 100% committed to. I find the days easy because I truly love what I do.

What is Human Security, what is the Women, Peace & Security and why is it important to foreign policymakers?

Human Security has been around in a UN context since 1994 but mostly in a development context. It’s the idea that humans should have freedom from fear, from want and need. For us in NATO, Human Security comes out of our Protection of Civilians concept and the idea that everything we do needs to be population-centric. It means that we take a proactive approach to protection and that the affected people have to be at the heart of all that we do. 

We have learnt lessons from Afghanistan, that we have to make sure our actions are guided by the communities we serve. So Human Security is about that – a holistic approach to security which puts people at the centre.

All of the areas my team and I deal with are about supporting security and peace, preventing risk and addressing the threats.

Re: Women, Peace & Security. As 50+% of the population are women, a gendered perspective and addressing the role of women is essential in the context of NATO’s strategic objectives. There is a direct correlation between inequality and insecurity. Defence and Security policies and strategies must mainstream a gender perspective. WPS is connected to all the work NATO does in relation to Defence planning, operations and operational planning. We believe that gender equality is based on two things; increasing the numbers of women, but because as we know, increasing the numbers of women does not mean we have equality, It has to be coupled and integrated with the mainstreaming of a gender perspective. If you only put women at the table and don’t address all the other parts then it won’t make any difference.

For population-centric operations to respond to the specific needs of the population then our understanding must be gendered. Children and Armed Conflict, youth peace and security, masculinities and conflict – Gender and the socialization of young girls and boys is a key component in driving our understanding of these Human Security issues. For example, If we don’t address young men, born of war, socialised by the conflict, mythologizing the warriors of the past then there is a huge security risk that can evolve and has the potential to drive the cyclical nature of violence and conflict. 

Gender is the thread NATO weaves through all the cross-cutting Human Security issues. 70% + of those trafficked are women and girls, women and girls are most at risk of sexual violence during conflict. There is a huge gender dynamic to all the Human Security pieces.

When we put those together then we can begin to address the range of peace, conflict and how we mitigate and respond. This is something new in the context of Defence & Security. This is progress and this is a new approach.

What are your proudest achievements while at NATO?

I am so proud of how we have grown, the establishment of the Human Security Unit and the commitment of the team, who can take forward this agenda. I am very proud of the work that the Alliance has done overall and how it has implemented our policies and progressed the WPS Agenda.

I am particularly proud of the Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA) Policy that was recently approved and adopted. It is the first-ever NATO Policy on SEA and it shows that the Alliance is progressing and that NATO as a whole has embraced and sees the value in the WPS Agenda.

The WPS Agenda and Human Security are firmly on the agenda for NATO.