Project Description
- Client: NATO
- User Group: Gender Perspective Post
- Status: Completed
The Allied Command Transformation’s Gender Advisor (ACT GENAD) Office and the NATO Innovation Hub, with support from the project academic partner team at Virginia Wesleyan University (WU), are on the AzuritOwl project, which is an initiative to explore and innovate in the field of gender perspective in military operations and activities, aiming to enhance and adapt NATO’s approach and processes.
NATO’s essential and enduring aim is to safeguard the freedom and security of all its members by political and military means. NATO strive to secure a lasting peace in the Euro-Atlantic area, based on common values of individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. The 2022 Strategic Concept remind that NATO’s key purpose is to ensure the collective defence of its members, based on a 360-degree approach and its three core tasks: deterrence and defence, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security. It also emphasises, as part of its principles, that NATO will continue to advance gender equality as a reflection of its values and will integrate the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda across all its tasks
Highlights
Gender analysis is not a standalone process and needs to be incorporated in every phase, from the start of planning, to when we monitor an area of interest (potential future area of operations or missions) and then is continuously assessed with the evolution of the situation (prior and during the engagement).
NATO aims to ensure the collective defense of its members through its three core tasks; Deterrence and Defense, Crisis Prevention and Management, and Cooperative Security. All of which are enhanced with the systematic integration of gender perspective, increasing the Alliance’s effectiveness through all components of NATO’s fighting power (moral, conceptual and physical), and thus, contributing to lasting peace, stability and security.
The AzuritOwl project has created an exchange mechanism enabling NATO’s Gender Advisory community to further assess, refine and increase knowledge about gender perspectives in military operations and activities, while exploring different approaches and innovative methods to integrate gender perspectives and conduct gender analysis.
The aim is to deliver a modern and technology-assisted tool to support NATO’s gender analysis process in order to be comprehensive, “deeper” and “faster”, while also mitigating biases present in human performance.
During the military decision-making or planning process, this is equally important when personnel are required to work with restrictions such as limited time, workforce, and resources.
As part of the final step to the ‘understanding phase’ of this project, the forum results will be published in preparation for the online workshop that contributors are invited to attend once the forum is concluded, by the end of July.
The data and information gathered through interviews, email exchanges and in the forum will contribute to the future of how NATO integrates gender perspective and operationalises the WPS agenda. This will be made available for the participants after further development of the project.
The conception of this initiative is in the spirit of the 2023 theme of International Women’s Day, “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality”.
Furthermore, this initiative contributes to the digital transformation to modernise, inform and create a more agile Alliance.
