The nexus between COVID-19 and gender, peace, and security: opportunities and risks for gender planning responses

ABSTRACT This article presents a textual analysis of areas of convergence and divergence between the United Nations (UN) Framework for the Immediate Socio-Economic Response to COVID-19 and the six National Action Plans (NAPs) on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) of the Arab States region. The article contributes to debates on the centering or sidelining of gender analysis and planning in crisis response to the nexus between COVID-19 and gender, peace, and security. Gender and gender planning inform the textual analysis, which shows that there are significant areas of overlap between the UN COVID-19 Framework and the NAPs. Divergences, such as the greater emphasis on economic recovery in the UN COVID-19 Framework, expose the gaps in engagement with the socio-economic and subsistence harms in the WPS agenda. Given the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, and the expectation of future novel outbreaks, the article provides evidence that rather than sidelining gender in times of crisis, existing tools such as NAPs should be centered in planning responses.


Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has been officially termed "the worst combined health and socioeconomic crisis in living memory, and a catastrophe at every level" by the World Health Organization's Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (2021, 4).The panel's 2021 report contained a damning evaluation of the gaps in planning and the resulting global response.The panel's co-chair, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, offered a telling personal reflection at the launch of the report: "The shelves of storage rooms in the UN [United Nations] and national capitals are full of reports and reviews of previous health crises.Had their warnings been heeded, we would have avoided the catastrophe we face today" (Wise 2021).
As a feminist scholar and a former practitioner in humanitarian emergency response, I found that the rapid and global advancement of the COVID-19 crisis prompted a number of personal reflections that became the motivation for and basis of this article.First, most striking was how the crisis exposed fault lines of inequalities in our societies and how its impact along gendered, racial, and economic lines became rapidly evident (Boulware 2020).The ease with which popular media, social commentary, and even my own family members could suddenly discuss "gender and the pandemic," and particularly its toll in terms of violence against women (VAW), was quite remarkable (see Harman 2021).I wondered to what degree the visibility of an issue tallied with a policy response that fully understood and addressed gender and wider inequalities.Would the obvious hook offered by the issue of VAW dominate as "the gender issue" to be addressed, or would structural gendered inequalities, including the pre-pandemic burden of care and precarity of employment for many women, prompt similar responses?
Second, the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to illustrate the relevance of, and perhaps could be helpfully understood through, feminist theories of continuums and their critiques (Boesten 2017;Cockburn 2004;Kelly 1998;Moser 2001;Swaine 2018aSwaine , 2021;;Urban Walker 2009).While potentially offering a deeper understanding of the relationship between the pandemic and issues such as VAW, continuums could also illuminate the role of geopolitical inequalities in the uneven global effects of the pandemic, from peace to insecurities (Swaine 2021).Pre-existing conditions present in conflict and post-conflict settings amplify and are amplified by infectious disease outbreaks (IDOs), particularly where there has been little preparedness planning; where resource-poor services are already under strain; and where already politicized ethnic, economic, and social inequalities and barriers stymy access to response services (Gostin, Sircar, and Friedman 2019;Masumbuko, Underschultz, and Hawkes 2018).Connections between pre-conflict and during-conflict gender inequalities and IDOs in conflict settings have also, for example, resulted in sexual violence and exploitation by security forces in their enforcement of containment measures, women's exclusion from decision making in response to the IDOs, and higher infection rates among women (Harman 2016;Nkangu, Olatunde, and Yaya 2017;Paquette, George, and Raghavan 2020).Lessons from crises such as Ebola in locations such as Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, however, show that despite this evidence, gender analysis is routinely sidelined, the specific vulnerabilities experienced by women are neglected, and, overall, responses to IDOs are characterized "by the 'tyranny of the urgent,'" which sets aside structural issues in favor of addressing immediate biomedical needs (Davies andBennett 2016, 1041; see also Harman 2021).This is all despite the existence of global gender policy instruments, such as the UN Security Council's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, that have specifically established the need for gendered crisis response in contexts of peacebuilding and insecurity.In such environments of competing urgent priorities, would gender equality concerns, never fully invested in before the crisis, be addressed or set aside in responses to this pandemic?Would existing feminist knowledge and tools such as the WPS agenda inform immediate and longer-term response and recovery planning?Key, in terms of conflict contexts, is whether the nexus between the pandemic and gender, peace, and security would be addressed in emerging responses.
Third, and confirmed by the Independent Panel's report, it became increasingly evident as the pandemic progressed that for most states it entailed firefighting responses and planning after the fact.Sirleaf's observation points to the volumes of existing but ignored crisis-planning lessons that exist at the global level.For example, a 2007 World Health Organization report on "global public health security" provides evidence of the threat of viral pandemics and the need for planning that includes consideration of specific impacts on women (WHO 2007).Similarly, the UN's High-Level Panel on the Global Response to Health Crises (focused on the Ebola outbreaks) recommends addressing the "gendered aspects" of health crises (UN 2016, 13).Feminist research has shown that the "gender dimensions of outbreaks are both physical and socially constructed" and that, despite the evidence, "gender analysis has been conspicuously absent" from global policy responses to IDOs (Smith 2019, 356; see also Harman 2021).Given the obvious gendered nature and impacts of the crisis resulting from the pandemic, would gender and gender planning feature in emerging global responses?Some clues quickly appeared.Through correspondence with actors in the Arab States region, for example, I quickly learned that a pattern was emerging.Gender analysis, and particularly gender planning tools that states already had to hand, such as National Action Plans (NAPs) on WPS, were being overlooked in COVID-19 planning and responses.Even though the NAPs set out clear guidance for gendered humanitarian and peacebuilding actions that were still relevant despiteand perhaps even more so because ofthe pandemic, there was a sense that feminist actors needed to show that "the NAP 1325 must remain a key framework for action" in the emerging pandemic conditions (UN Women 2020d, 2). 1 Further, new frameworks of response were being rapidly developed.I wondered whether, within that rapidity, the aforementioned "tyranny of the urgent" so common in emergency response was once again likely to present a risk to fulsome gendered responses globally.In the early days of the pandemic (April 2020), the UN quickly produced its Framework for the Immediate Socio-Economic Response to COVID-19 (UN 2020; hereafter the UN COVID-19 Framework).Based on a five-pillar approach, it established an overarching scaffolding for thematic areas of action in global and national responses to the pandemic.The refrain "building back better" was centered in this framework and in the global and national hand-wringing responses that followed the sudden onset of the pandemic (see OECD 2020).In light of feminist critiques of post-conflict recovery processes in which a return to the pre-conflict context is an established regressive step for women, that refrain immediately set off alarm bells.What would the rapid and ad hoc planning to "build back better" actually do and mean for women's equality concerns that pre-dated, were exacerbated by, and would continue after the pandemic?
Shortly before the outbreak of COVID-19, researchers had noted that "[f]ighting disease in conflict zones and disaster settings is rapidly becoming the new normal" (Gostin, Sircar, and Friedman 2019, 7).The newly emerging COVID-19 IDO represented this eventuality and illuminated the role of prepandemic global macro-and micro-level inequalities in its uneven impact, requiring specific responses in conflict settings (ICG 2020;Oxfam 2020).The UN's tool became the primary global framework.It engaged to some degree with gender and with issues of peace and security and, importantly, referenced the Sustainable Development Goals, thereby linking it with broader human development policy ambitions (UN 2020).
It seemed that existing tools such as the WPS resolutions and existing NAPs, however, were not to be positioned as tools of response in the same way.The soundings from the Arab States and other regions pointed to this, as did the initial paralysis of the UN Security Council in responding to the pandemic with respect to its mandate, and indeed in its failure to center or even reference the WPS agenda in its eventual resolution on the matter in July 2020 (GAPS 2020;Jaghab 2020;Silbert 2020;UNSC 2020).Implementing the WPS agenda and responding to COVID-19 are arguably not mutually exclusive endeavors.Addressing the outbreak of an IDO within a conflict setting is also not mutually exclusive from addressing the broader exigencies of that conflict (Gostin, Sircar, and Friedman 2019).Addressing ongoing concerns such as women's participation and protection in peace and security is arguably related to and as significant as their participation and protection within newly emerging responses to COVID-19 in those same contexts.Rather than it being an either/or scenario, which to date has arguably negated gender equality in the hierarchy of frameworks perceived to be needed in times of "real" crisis, both the UN-led global framework and national strategies (NAPs) could arguably have mutually constitutive roles to play.This is a significant consideration given that an overarching global framework developed in the UN Secretary-General's office simply cannot provide the kind of detailed, context-relevant guidance that planning tailored (to some degree) around priorities identified by women in those contexts, such as NAPs, can offer.Whether synergies between both planning frameworks could strengthen approaches to COVID-19 in conflict contexts, or whether one might offer comparative advantage with respect to some areas of planning responses over the other, are therefore critical considerations.Given the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, and the expectation that there are more of these novel IDOs to come that will need to be addressed in conflict settings in the future (Gostin, Sircar, and Friedman 2019;UN 2016;WHO 2007;Wise 2021), 2 these frameworks should be assessed for what they might offer in terms of complementarity rather than perceived in terms of a ranking of what is most appropriate when.
This article attempts to do so by presenting a comparative analysis of NAPs and the UN COVID-19 Framework as two sets of planning tools relevant to responses to COVID-19 in conflict contexts.It aims to contribute to debates on the centering or sidelining of gender analysis and planning in current and future crisis responses to COVID-19/IDOs in contexts of peace and security.The article examines the intersections, comparative advantages, and divergences between the two sets of policies to allow for the identification of risks and opportunities for a comprehensive gendered response to COVID-19 in conflict contexts.Specifically, the article presents the findings of a comparative textual analysis of the six NAPs of the Arab States region as a confined selection (case study) of existing NAPs: the Republic of Iraq, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the Lebanese Republic, the State of Palestine, the Republic of Tunisia, and the Republic of Yemen.These particular NAPs were selected due to the aforementioned work by actors in the region to make them visible and relevant to UN, state, and wider COVID-19 planning.The frameworks of gender and gender planning inform the assessment, while the idea of continuums and its significance to planning in response to COVID-19 is also a theme threaded throughout the analysis.
These frameworks and the background to the article and the textual analysis are set out in the next section.The findings of the textual analysis are then discussed under the four pillars of the WPS agenda, within which critical feminist dilemmas relating to each area are identified.The article concludes that a multi-faceted approach that addresses continuums of inequalities and systemic exclusions across global spaces is required, as is the complementarity between existing and newly tailored planning.

Background: gender planning for COVID-19, peace, and security
In terms of its impacts, an IDO such as COVID-19 cannot be understood as a singular isolated "event."Nor can it be understood without recognition of the antecedent effects of macro-and micro-level systems of colonialism, racism, and sexism that have fueled its social potency and impact.The relationship between gender, race, and health status inequalities in particular, the insidious persistence of macroeconomic inequalities, and the prioritization of "militarised security and profit over human security and rights" (Chinkin and Rees 2020), for example, have all inevitably shaped its toll (Hankivsky and Kapilashrami 2020;Nkangu, Olatunde, and Yaya 2017;Sell 2020).Previous IDOs evidence more death and harm from non-epidemic causes than from the viruses themselves, underlining the real harm of pre-crisis gaps in human rights due diligence on the part of states (Sochas, Channon, and Nam 2017).The ways in which pre-existing and enduring insecurities and inequalities influence infection rates and broader societal impact thereby require as much attention as health systems responses do.
In contexts of armed conflict, these dynamics are further aggravated (Gostin, Sircar, and Friedman 2019;ICG 2020;Masumbuko, Underschultz, and Hawkes 2018).While poor health systems are often blamed for the detrimental impact of an IDO in a "developing" or resource-poor context, that assessment ignores the "broader forces of power that create the contexts in which inadequate health care systems (and indeed poverty) exist" (Hankivsky 2015, 15) in the first place.COVID-19 has not only had an uneven direct impact on the health and well-being of populations in conflict-affected locations, it has also had implications for global peace and security processes more generally.In the context of heightened tensions brought about by responses such as lockdown measures, the role of peacekeeping in holding fragile peace settlements in place, in containing viral spread, and in not contributing to that spread becomes vital (ICG 2020).Concerns related to the WPS agenda, such as ongoing barriers to women's participation in peace processes, are exacerbated.For example, with reference to COVID-19, it was already a challenge to secure women's active participation in peace talks in the Arab States region, and those efforts experienced a further setback in the form of travel restrictions imposed at the outset of the outbreak (ICG 2020).The turn to virtual meetings, which should arguably provide new opportunities for women's civil society, has yet to evidence significant progress (Malek 2020).It has become crystal clear that COVID-19 "lays bare stark disparities in power" (Lokot and Avakyan 2020, 1), and addressing those requires engaging with the nexus between a viral outbreak, multiple discriminations, and the dynamics of an armed conflict (Al-Ali 2020; Hankivsky 2015; Wenham, Smith, and Morgan 2020).An understanding of this pandemic through an "intersectional understanding" of continuums makes obvious that it will "produce a continuity of effects, not episodic cases" (Forester and O'Brien 2020) of inequalities for different women in different ways in different locations.
Anecdotal evidence, media reports, and emerging research thereby underline the gendered impacts of COVID-19 within and outside of armed conflict contexts that are wide and variedperhaps as varied as the partial efforts by governments in adopting adequate gendered responses (Wenham, Smith, and Morgan 2020).Planning in reaction to COVID-19 by international organizations and states determines not just material, practical, and monetary responses, but also what becomes known about and addressed in the context of the pandemic, at least in official terms.As noted, the refrain "building back better" has consumed pandemic oratory.It implies a hope that recovery should offer a salve to the shocks that should have been prepared for, but were not, as noted by Sirleaf, and should involve a robust tackling of the inequalities that have been exposed and amplified by the pandemic.However, ardent attention to what that actually means is required by feminists.Whether and how gender and the broader relational systems of power at the heart of the unequal spread of infection are centered in that "building back better" has yet to be fully assessed.
The early leading global planning approach, the UN COVID-19 Framework, which centered "building back better," established a five-pillar response to the pandemic: (1) health, (2) protecting people, (3) economic response and recovery, (4) macroeconomic response and multilateral collaboration, and (5) social cohesion and community resilience.The actions within these areas are varied and extend to health systems responses as well as beyond those to include actions on issues such as VAW and women's entrepreneurship within the macroeconomic pillar.While the UN COVID-19 Framework thereby attempts to address gender and women's rights issues, it is important to acknowledge that, as with many planning documents, these are added-on features, rather than forming the basis of the conceptualization and construction of the framework around social relations and resulting inequalities, particularly those most pertinent in the pandemic, such as gender, race, and economic strata.Further, as a UN guide, positioning existing international as well as national instruments in the framework would have ensured much more congruence between prepandemic knowledge and planning than is currently emphasized.Planning frameworks and the leadership offered by them are critical, but that leadership should point to the importance of jurisdictional and context-relevant gender and social relations analysis as the operational approach.
Planning to "advance gender equality as planned change" (Currie 1999, 21) and to do so in ways that address global political, racial, and health inequalities is needed in this pandemic.Planning and planning frameworks by their very nature are reductive.Gender planning, an approach that emerged in the 1990s and strived to make visible the political contexts and "field of power and inequality" (Fainstein and Servon 2005, 2) in which planning decisions are generally made, has gone some way toward making gender analysis and gender equality as planned change central to the development field.The equivalent, "gender planning for peace and security" (Swaine 2018b), has arisen from the WPS agenda and is embodied by the aforementioned NAPs.IDO responses in conflict-affected contexts imply, as outlined, responses that are common across non-conflict settings, as well as those tailored to specific peace and security dynamics.These include, for example, sensitivity in the use of security actors to implement containment measures given the politics of a conflict; humanitarian relief and peacebuilding tailored to new IDO realities; and statutory and non-statutory services in the areas of health, education, shelter, protection, and beyond, specific to the emerging nexus of the conflict with the IDO.This centers the WPS agenda, which has already established a role for itself in addressing IDOs.
Resolution 2242 (2015) acknowledges "the changing global context of peace and security, in particular relating to … [inter alia] … the global nature of health pandemics" (UNSC 2015).That resolution, and the further nine WPS resolutions, are relevant to all areas of pandemic response discussed above.The primary pillars of the WPS agendaprevention, protection, participation, and relief and recoverycorrespond with those areas, as well as with the areas of action under the UN COVID-19 Framework.They are also used in many NAPs globally to frame the national gender planning actions for peace and security.Bringing them together here emphasizes the opportunity that they represent in terms of reinforcing gender analytical planning.In doing so, the critiques of the NAPs, just like those of the UN COVID-19 Framework, are acknowledged.They have been heavily criticized for embodying "state feminism" (Geha 2020) as tools that not only instrumentalize women, but are also instruments themselves, used by states to position themselves as "civilized" interlocutors, while simultaneously ignoring their own national militaristic ideologies (Motoyama 2018).NAPs are characterized by the faults, gaps, and perpetuation of reductive gendered and geopolitical racialized tropes that have typified approaches within gender planning theory and the WPS agenda itself: women's lives become mediated through the planning process by (often external) planners; deeply political concepts such as sexualities and reproductive rights are de-radicalized for co-optation; and the lives of some women (mainly those from the Global South) become subject to patronizing planning in ways that those of others do not, with the system determining the conditions of that planning (Locke and Okali 1999;Moser 1993;Wieringa 1998).
However, NAPs have also become a significant means for civil society to engage with states and push for women's interests and concerns.Despite their multiple flaws, they do for many imply a planning framework derived from some degree of collaboration with women's civil society that can guide women-centric, if not gendered, responses to the pandemic.While not specifically tailored to a viral pandemic, and certainly not the panacea to gendered responses to a crisis of this kind, the knowledge, analysis, content, and coordination structures of NAPs, and the (limited) visibility and leverage that they give to women's leadership at national levels (Haastrup and Hagen 2020), at least make them a pre-existing, informative, and adaptable resource in the sudden emergence of an IDO.
In the spirit of "[a]daptive planning [that] makes the background knowledge associated with the prestored plan explicit" (Alterman 1988, 394) that is, the (limited) gendered analysis and consultation with women's civil society that underpins (or should underpin) a NAP -NAPs are a critical existing tool to develop better understandings of and planning for COVID-19 with respect to peace and security.In tandem, the UN COVID-19 Framework recognizes that "the virus is exposing structural fragilities that would have been attenuated through more rapid, effective and universal development responses in the past" (UN 2020, 3).There is congruence here with the original intentions behind the advocacy for the WPS agendathat is, for it to be transformative of the structural inequalities underpinning global challenges to peace and security.It is also constitutive of the idea of continuums such that inequalities before the pandemic, such as the exclusion of women from decision making and gendered violence that exist across different times and spaces (Cockburn 2004;Kelly 1998;Moser 2001), become central concerns to pandemic planning responses.Recognizing the specifics of an armed conflict and the connections to pre-pandemic inequalities, as well as the distinctions in the ways in which those inequalities manifest during the pandemic, becomes central to informing gender planning in response to the nexus between COVID-19 and gender, peace, and security.Below, NAPs and the UN COVID-19 Framework are assessed through this lens.

Comparative textual analysis: critical synergies and feminist dilemmas
Drawing on the critiques discussed in the previous section, the NAPs of Iraq (Government of Iraq 2014), Jordan (Jordanian National Commission for Women 2017), Lebanon (Lebanese Republic 2019), Palestine (State of Palestine 2017), Tunisia (Republic of Tunisia 2018), and Yemen (Republic of Yemen 2020) were comparatively assessed with the UN COVID-19 Framework.On the assumption that the UN COVID-19 Framework provides an overarching framework for thematic areas of response to the pandemic, the analysis assessed synergies between the NAPs and the actions outlined in that framework.The textual analysis assessed whether and how the areas of action of each of the six NAPswhich largely fall under prevention, protection, participation, and relief and recoveryintersect with the five pillars of the UN COVID-19 Framework: (1) health, (2) protecting people, (3) economic response and recovery, (4) macroeconomic response and multilateral collaboration, and (5) social cohesion and community resilience.The following questions guided the textual analysis: . Are there specific areas of synergy between each set of actions? .Are there specific areas of divergence?
. What are the added value and potential areas of risk across these synergies and divergences?
To undertake the textual analysis, the actions matrixes of the six NAPs of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, and Yemen were extracted and imported into Microsoft Excel.The action areas under each of the five pillars of the UN COVID-19 Framework were also imported into Excel.The actions of each NAP were cross-assessed with the UN COVID-19 Framework.Quantitative and qualitative assessments were undertaken of each NAP, as well as collated, and thematic areas of findings were identified.In line with the motivations of this article to explore the degree to which gender and gender planning inform and are relevant to COVID-19 responses in conflict settings, the discussion of the findings is framed around the pillars of the WPS agenda, not only to organize the discussion but also to underline the congruence between the UN COVID-19 Framework and the pre-existing resolutions and national planning frameworks in the selected countries. 3 Overall, the comparative textual analysis revealed that in terms of the broad initial picture, of the total number of actions across the Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, and Yemen NAPs, 64 percent are identifiable as directly related to the actions set out in the UN COVID-19 Framework (see Figure 1).These include, for example, actions relating to the health pillar, such as medical and mental health services in refugee camps (see, for instance, the Jordan NAP, actions under Outcome 3.2); actions relating to protecting people, such as laws and services to address VAW (see the Lebanon NAP, actions under Outcome 1); and actions under the social cohesion and community resilience pillar, such as actions to include women in reconciliation initiatives (see the Palestine NAP, actions under Strategic Objective 3).
There is a degree of variance across the NAPs in terms of their overall synergies with the UN COVID-19 Framework.For example, 89 percent of actions in the Yemen NAP and 79 percent and 77 percent of the actions in the Iraq and Tunisia NAPs, respectively, correspond with actions under the pillars of the UN COVID-19 Framework, whereas just 33 percent of the actions in Jordan's NAP do (see Figure 2).
There is also variance across the NAPs in terms of the range and number of actions corresponding with the five pillars of the UN COVID-19 Framework (see Figure 3).
These variances offer some critical insights into the nature and content of existing NAPs, not just in relation to responses to COVID-19 and the UN COVID-19 Framework, but also with respect to the relationship between these NAPs and early feminist tenets of the WPS agenda and whether they contribute to gender equality as planned change (that is, gender analytical planning).Observations on this with respect to synergies and divergences across the two sets of frameworks are elucidated in the following sections in line with the WPS pillars of protection; prevention and participation (which are discussed together); and relief and recovery.

Protection
The analysis found most congruence between the NAPs and the UN COVID-19 Framework in actions that relate to the protecting people pillar (61 percent).Among the NAPs, the Tunisia and Yemen NAPs have the most actions relating to protecting people, at 55 percent and 50 percent, respectively, while the Palestine NAP has the least, at 23 percent.Of those actions, the majority relate to policy and programming responses to VAW, which account for 47 percent of the total actions related to the protecting people pillar (that is, of the 61 percent actions that are related to the protecting people pillar; see Figure 4).As the pandemic gained traction in the Arab States region, reporting of intimate partner violence increased, as did the severity of physical violence and the prevalence of homicides of women across the region (Azari 2020; Barkawi and Farouk 2020;Najjar 2020).The closure of legal services and confinement in countries such as Tunisia and Iraq prevented access to court-ordered safety mechanisms, including child support and custody arrangements (Mednick 2020; Tarzi 2020; UN Women 2020a; UN Women et al. 2020).In Iraq, evidence showed that the closure of borders and legal services also prevented women from returning from displacement to re-establish ownership of land and property (Gorevan and Boswijk 2020).These realities pre-existed the pandemic, and all six NAPs have a strong focus on responding to VAW.This is a trend that is evident in NAPs globally, and that reflects the critique that has been leveled at the WPS agenda generally.The racialized and paternalistic ease with which the UN Security Council has predominantly focused on sexualized harm against women in the WPS agenda by men in those "other" contexts and its deliberate focus on militarized actors, as if that harm were specific to those actors and unrelated to pre-existing rates of VAW, has received particular critique (de Almagro 2017; Meger 2016).There is a predominant focus on the protection pillar of the WPS agenda in WPS planning across these and wider NAPs.The actions in these NAPs, and significantly in the UN COVID-19 Framework, primarily focus on protection from and response to the impacts of VAW, affirming my early suspicion that VAW might become "the gender issue" of the pandemic.Both the NAPs and the UN COVID-19 Framework, however, seem to overlook the prevention of VAW and actions taken to address the structural roots of its causes.Given what is now known about VAW in conflict and humanitarian emergenciesthat it both relates to its prevalence pre-crisis and, in some cases, manifests in distinctive ways requiring specific understanding and response in conflict dynamics (Boesten 2017;Swaine 2018a)this represents a significant oversight in both sets of plans with respect to fully addressing the issue.In the case of the UN COVID-19 Framework, it also emphasizes a lack of understanding of "building back better" in ways that address continuums of harm in the nexus between COVID-19 and gender, peace, and security.There is, as has been evidenced more broadly by this pandemic, a need for response services that specifically address VAW, and this critique does not detract from that enduring need.For example, in practical terms, NAPs such as that of Iraq include actions to train police in response to VAW, to amend laws on women's rights fulfillment, and to provide shelter services.These are all actions that are critical to have established in advance of a health crisis such as COVID-19.In that way, the right laws, data collection methods, and services are in place to respond to VAW on an ongoing basis, as well as when there are increased reports violence and need for services and shelters as a result of a health crisis such as COVID-19.On the basis of having these actions available through a NAP, such measures can be adapted in line with virus control measures while deliberate steps are taken to ensure that access to services continues in the context of confinement constraints.The critique here evidences what may be observed in many state policy developments globally, which is an ease with protecting victimized (and often racialized) women and an unease with addressing inequalities and discrimination in concrete terms.It is critical that the increased reporting of VAW in the region as a result of COVID-19 is not interpreted as simply a symptom of the pandemic.Rather, health crises such as this pandemic and other conflict-induced crises evidence the ways in which pre-existing conditions of inequality affect how women live their lives and how they experience a crisis when it occurs.The most recent resolution of the WPS agenda, Resolution 2467, recognizes in its preamble that "sexual violence in conflict occurs on a continuum of interrelated and recurring forms of violence against women and girls" (UNSC 2019).The UN COVID-19 Framework actually identifies the need for "gendered approaches to build back better" (UN 2020, 10) in recovery from the pandemic.A pivot toward a continuums approach that acknowledges continuums in inequalities along gendered, racial, and economic fault lines, and engagement with how the WPS agenda now acknowledges continuums, would be a significant step forward.
The protecting people pillar of the UN COVID-19 Framework also includes actions relating to education, broader social protection systems, and humanitarian relief and for those in different forms of detention, all of which align with the WPS agenda.In relation to humanitarian relief, the Lebanon NAP includes actions to undertake gender analysis in humanitarian response and disaster preparedness, and the Palestine NAP has actions to ensure that women receive access to safe drinking water and food.These are important pre-existing practical planning measures that would be critical in responses to COVID-19 and in particular to ensure that the UN COVID-19 Framework is informed by micro-level gendered analysis and gender planning approaches.The synergies here and the necessity for the WPS agenda to be used to address gaps in the UN COVID-19 Framework are evident.
Further, gaps in the agenda are exposed by the UN COVID-19 Framework's focus on practical humanitarian necessities.Gender planning analysis of NAPs in other regions and in the wider WPS agenda has shown that NAPs fail to address the practical needs of women; that is, the predominant focus on women's participation and protection ignores the need for a focus on the basics of food, shelter, and access to education in many crisis contexts (Swaine 2020).Gaps in gendered analysis of socio-economic violence and of deprivation of human subsistence needs are hugely neglected in feminist and wider scholarship and in practical responses (Sankey 2015).Of significance is that "subsistence harms constitute a pervasive form of violence, which has particular gendered implications and interrelates with other gendered harms" (Sankey 2015, 26), continuing across periods of conflict and IDOs and their intersection in humanitarian crises.The UN COVID-19 Framework places more emphasis on the basics of human security and offers a salve to gaps in WPS-related planning, a significant site of divergence between the two.However, the nature of gendered continuums of subsistence harmsthe ways in which politicized ethnicities, pre-existing racial exclusions, and broader geopolitical inequalities at the global level inform how and where such subsistence harms manifestis neglected across these frameworks and requires critical scrutiny for a gender and racially just "building back better" to be achieved.
In the region, the need to address the risk of infection for women in detention, particularly those with children, is reportedly receiving neither adequate nor gendered responses (UN Women et al. 2020).In Tunisia, detention and holding centers for migrants and asylum seekers are estimated to lack the sanitation and facilities required to safely respond to the virus (Volkman 2020).Resolution 2467 is the only WPS resolution to mention "detention," and the provision refers specifically to men and boys at risk of sexual violence in detention (UNSC 2019).The NAPs of Jordan and Tunisia, however, mention "women in detention," demonstrating the utility of WPS planning going beyond the reach of the resolutions and being tailored to national contexts.The UN COVID-19 Framework offers a better recognition of these issues, pointing to varied types of detention, including the significance of the detention of migrants, demonstrating the utility of congruent implementation.The Tunisia NAP includes actions to upgrade detention centers to "meet international standards" and to use a "gender and human rights approach for all age groups to prevent sexual violence" in those centers (Republic of Tunisia 2018, 21, 12).The Lebanon NAP also refers to "women in prisons" in identifying gaps in social protection services (Lebanese Republic 2019, 46).These are important practical measures that require implementation on an ongoing basis while becoming even more urgent with the onset of an IDO.The potential for using both NAPs and the UN COVID-19 Framework is significant, particularly where gendered approaches to detention may be overlooked in the health and economic-centric focus characterizing early COVID-19 responses and where WPS action planning neglects such issues.

Prevention and participation
The second-highest area of congruence between the NAPs and the UN COVID-19 Framework is between the WPS agenda's push for women's participation in all aspects of the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict and the UN COVID-19 Framework's social cohesion and community resilience pillar.Ensuring that the COVID-19 pandemic did not undo progress on community-level cohesion and peacebuilding regionally, but that social dialogue and peace processes retain support and momentum wherever possible, became critical in the pandemic (ICG 2020).The Yemen and Palestine NAPs contain the highest percentage of correlating actions (27 percent and 17 percent, respectively)not surprising given that both states are affected by ongoing political contestation (see Figure 3).Both NAPs contain actions that include the role of women in reconciliation initiatives, with the Yemen NAP aiming for 30 percent representation of women in those processes.While policies such as confinement and social distancing may inhibit social interactions, the principles of social dialogue and empowerment underpinning the UN COVID-19 Framework's social cohesion and community resilience pillar are an important emphasis to those set out under the WPS agenda.Women's participation has also taken on an additional hue in the context of the pandemicwhether women are included in planning and decision making in responses to COVID-19.Women's organizations in the region immediately adapted their work and took on significant roles to advance appropriate knowledge and measures in their communities.This is where gender planning and continuums become really significant and intersect.Addressing gaps in women's participation before crises is already planned for in the NAPs, but enduring gaps carry over when a health crisis such as COVID-19 hits.Continuums of inequalities hamper women's leadership and contributions, significant in many ways, as debated in the literature on the WPS agenda.Even when a new crisis response plan such as the UN COVID-19 Framework attempts to ensure women's participation, historical patterns of exclusion and neglect, and those privileging some women over others, mean that the crisis response will be partial given pre-existing cumulative gaps in the participation of women and its effects.Here, gender planning needs to confront the fact that different women will have been excluded in different ways, aiming not just to add women but to engage with the antecedent effects of historical gender, racial, and socio-economic exclusion.
In assessing these planning instruments, the textual analysis was challenged with identifying whether and how actions in the NAPs that focus on "adding women" to security and peacekeeping forces, an approach that has come to predominate within the WPS agenda, are relational to the UN COVID-19 Framework.While security and stability may be key in pandemic containment (Garrett 2018), the health risks associated with an IDO are difficult to balance with those also associated with a state's decision to use militarized approaches to enforce its containment measures.Across the NAPs, actions that provide gender training, which ensures gender balance in security actors, all aim to establish a functioning security sector ready to respond in appropriate ways to a crisis such as this.Under the Jordan NAP, for example, the Public Security Directorate and the Jordanian Armed Forces deployed mixed female and male crisis teams to provide services to citizens during pandemic confinement, an important strategy and yet wholly militarized.The ways in which feminist agendas such as WPS have been co-opted present not only reductive approaches, but also critical feminist dilemmas.This is particularly true of responses to the pandemic that involve the enforcement of containment measures: [T]reating disease similar to the more "typical" threats to peace and security (i.e.armed conflict) and invoking Chapter VII of the UN Charter can lead to overmilitarization, which "instills fear, deters symptomatic individuals from seeking treatment, and has damaging socioeconomic consequences."(Sell 2020, 214, citing Agnew 2016, 124) The role of security institutions in enforcing lockdowns is a critical concern and became an evident practice in responses to COVID-19.Specific difficulties arise where those same forces have been associated with oppressive militarized tactics in earlier and ongoing armed political contestation and have been party to rights violations against the same populations that they are now monitoring for COVID-19 compliance (Abu Habib 2020).Militarized actions may also become reminiscent of "colonial coercion in the name of promoting hygiene … creat[ing] a heightened sense of uncertainty and distrust" for affected communities (Le Roux-Kemp 2018, 282).Further, "the security sector is rarely well-positioned to uphold and ensure that everyone in a community can realise all of their securities" (Smith 2019, 359), and a role for security forces reinforces a type of masculine dominance in decision making, exacerbating insecurities for women.Feminists have long considered that "the WPS agenda has not been able to deliver on its feminist transformative promise [and] has been co-opted by the militarism of the Security Council in upholding a narrow and impoverished notion of national security" (Chinkin and Rees 2020).It is critical to consider whether using the WPS agenda as a driver of gender approaches would reinforce the centrality of securitized approaches to COVID-19.Many NAPs globally have been critiqued for their strong orientation toward state-centric security interests, reflecting the securitization that has characterized the WPS agenda since its inception (Hudson 2009).The NAPs often act as another means for a "state's narratives of the conflict and its marginalizations and discrimination" to be perpetuated (Parashar 2019, 5).There is a risk that the same would evolve in response to the nexus between COVID-19 and gender, peace, and security.Rather than gender planning, a form of securitized planning in the guise of gender planning emerges.

Relief and recovery
There is least overlap, in quantitative terms, between the actions under the health, economic response and recovery, and macroeconomic response and multilateral collaboration pillars of the UN COVID-19 Framework and the six NAPs.This prompts some pause with respect to the WPS agendais the agenda itself overlooking critical issues such as women's health rights and needs and their economic and employment rights, or are the NAPs failing to include these issues, or both?Women's broader health and particularly sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) have given rise to the most contention within member state debate on the WPS agenda and its place in the UN Security Council.Advocates and scholars have argued that NAPs should be context specific and relevant to national jurisdictions.Thus, in theory, NAPs can be used to override blocks at the global level by addressing SRHR within national-level responses.However, that fails to ensure that the WPS agenda provides a political framework for SRHR, particularly in humanitarian, conflict, and peacebuilding contexts in which it might be urgently needed.In the region, there were more women on the front lines of health service delivery during the pandemic in countries such as Tunisia, while deficiencies in vital reproductive care in Palestine were exacerbated by the military occupation, which inhibited the importing of essential medical supplies and required women to cross checkpoints for obstetric care (UN Women 2020b).General health, and particularly reproductive health, is a critical gap in terms of assessing the relevance of NAPs to women's health needs generally and to crises such as this pandemic specifically.Further, there is a danger that the orientation of COVID-19 planning toward viral control and economic impacts will enable the sexual politics of feminism underpinning the origins of the WPS agenda to be even more derided.Gender planning will be even more undermined and co-opted due to the medicalized focus of the response.
While the impact on macroeconomics as well as national economic systems as a result of COVID-19 has been clear globally, the analysis here finds very few actions within the NAPs focused on women's livelihoods, business entrepreneurship, formal economic roles, or informal economic activities, all of which are accounted for in the UN COVID-19 Framework.The Jordan, Palestine, and Tunisia NAPs have low percentages of actions on economic recovery and none on macroeconomic issues.It is estimated that women's roles in the informal economy, such as the production and selling of food, have been neglected in economic packages in locations such as Jordan (Rohof 2020).
However, pre-existing economic contraction in the region, now amplified by the pandemic, is a critical concern, estimated to have resulted in a 14 percent to 19 percent reduction in women's employment in Lebanon (Salti and Mezher 2020), while in Palestine, 95 percent of women's enterprises shut down with the onset of the pandemic (UN Women 2020c).The safety strategies used by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people facing employment discrimination were also fettered by COVID-19 confinement measures in locations such as Lebanon (Younes 2020).Iraq's "unprecedented economic downturn" due to the pandemic weakened the state's ability to respond to Islamic State's exploitation of lockdown measures to advance its resurgence, with undoubtedly catastrophic implications for women and girls (O'Driscoll and Fazil 2020).Female migrant workers, who were already in insecure situations, were subject to increased harmful cleaning duties as a result of COVID-19; those women were exposed to increased abuse and were unable to access help if they contracted the virus (Aoun 2020).There has been "street dumping" of women migrant workers in Lebanon and suicides among those who have been detained as they try to repatriate (Abu Habib 2020; Barkawi 2020).Despite these critical realities, which are a consequence of pre-pandemic realities, the NAPs of the region broadly evidence a lack of support for women's economic rights, workforce participation, and livelihoods, a phenomenon that has characterized postconflict peacebuilding strategies generally (Justino 2012).It is as if economics and certainly feminist economicsdoes not belong in the WPS agenda.
The Lebanon NAP does contain important outcomes focused on generating "favorable conditions including decent work and protections … for women in the formal and informal sectors" (Lebanese Republic 2019, 32).As has been shown in Ukraine, the "NAP's inattention to Ukrainian economic policies thus sharply contrasts with the gendered economic effects of the conflict and state reforms" (O'Sullivan 2020, 8).In response to the Zika and Ebola viruses, international organizations such as the World Health Organization and the World Bank have been shown to wholly neglect gendered economic analysis of the epidemics (Smith 2019).Similarly, using NAPs in response to the pandemic without addressing the gendered economic effects of austerity and other measures ignores the vital link between gender, security, and a health pandemic.The UN COVID-19 Framework, however, does set out significant actions that aim to ensure that gendered socio-economic assessments take place and that women entrepreneurs receive specific support.Where socio-economic rights and subsistence harms are neglected in the WPS agenda, the UN COVID-19 Framework diverges significantly and offers a potential redress to the gaps.

Conclusion
A successful response to the pandemic is not just about whether women, or even gender, are part of, central to, or added to the approach taken; rather, it is about whether the "gendered world itself is to be problematised" (Hudson 2016, 11) in understanding the impact of the pandemic and devising responses to it.A planning approach that accounts for the interrelated and enduring nature of multiple gendered, racial, and broader inequalities across the pre-crisis and during-crisis periods, and their connective and distinctive effects in a health crisis, is critical.As was learned from the Ebola crisis, "the change that is required necessitates challenging broader structures of power including neoliberalism, capitalism, and racism at all levels of politics and policy" (Hankivsky 2015, 15).In turn, in response to COVID-19, a shift is needed toward a "multipronged global approach" (Forester and O'Brien 2020) that addresses continuums of inequalities and systemic exclusions across education and health care and in devising ways to prevent and respond to VAW.
Overall, the analysis here also speaks to gender planning theory and emphasizes critiques that point to its need for intersectional and decolonial approaches.Given the longevity of the pandemic-induced crisis, and the likelihood of future novel IDOs, the article evidences that the nexus between COVID-19 and gender, peace, and security is critical to planning responses and that existing tools, such as NAPs, should be assessed for what they might offer rather than set aside.The importance of tools such as NAPs to a global framework developed in the head offices of the UN in a time or crisis is also emphasized.It is pertinent to conclude that successful responses to COVID-19 are wholly reliant on the degree to which states have been seriously tackling inequalities pre-crisis, and their willingness to consider "building back better" as reliant on doing the same.An intersectional gender planning approach is needed within NAPs more broadly and within global frameworks developed specifically to respond to COVID-19/future IDOs.
It is likely that official planning for COVID-19 or future IDOs will continue to be developed in isolation from existing and newly developed NAPs.It is also likely that emerging NAPs may attempt to over-reach, pivoting toward the pandemic and losing their original intentthat is, comprehensive implementation of planned gender equality change in relation to peace and security.Where congruence may emerge, there is an evidence-based likelihood that, in practice, planning for COVID-19 becomes the "adding on" of gender and of the WPS agenda, rather than planning that is based on and derived from a fulsome analysis of gender and wider power relations and their relationships to COVID-19 in the context of armed conflict.Even this article, in its attempt to assess synergies between NAPs and COVID-19, has ultimately evaluated how NAPs fit into or relate to an already existing framework.It remains to be seen whether planning tools, such as NAPs and the UN COVID-19 Framework, can address the enduring gendered impacts of this or future pandemics as symptomatic of gender inequalities existing in the world prior to the arrival of such pandemics rather than as new or unique and temporary outcomes of them.

Notes
1. Correspondence with the author in May 2020.This article draws on research that was commissioned at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 by the UN Women Regional Office for Arab States, titled "National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security: Critical Tools in COVID-19 Responses in the Arab States Region."That paper and this article were informed by discussions with UN actors and partners in the region at that time, which informed the observations referred to here in the text.Thanks to Rachel Dore-Weeks for the direction of that work, and to Madeline Gannon for research assistance.2. Among the now accepted "knowledge" is that governments and international agencies such as the World Health Organization "will increasingly find themselves fighting outbreaks in insecure, misgoverned or ungoverned zones, possibly experiencing active conflict" (Gostin, Sircar, and Friedman 2019, 6). 3. The analysis was limited to the planning documents, and the analysis presented here therefore focuses on the planning frameworks and does not extend to the level of implementation of the stated actions.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Percentage of actions in all six NAPs in line with the areas of action in the UN COVID-19 Framework.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Variance of percentage of actions that correspond to the UN COVID-19 Framework across all six NAPs.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Percentage of actions across thematic pillars of the UN COVID-19 Framework per each NAP.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. of actions on VAW out of the total actions that fall under the UN COVID-19 Framework protecting people pillar.
Aisling Swaine is Professor of Gender Studies in the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice at University College Dublin, Ireland.Her research interests focus on conflict-related violence against women; the Women, Peace and Security agenda; humanitarianism; transitional justice; and institutional strategies toward gender equality.Her book Conflict-Related Violence against Women: Transforming Transition was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.She has also published in Human Rights Quarterly, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, and the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law.Previously, she worked with the United Nations and international non-governmental aid organizations in humanitarian and post-conflict recovery settings globally.She is affiliated with the LSE Center on Women, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK; is a Visiting Fellow at the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University, UK; and was previously a Hauser Global Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice in the School of Law at New York University, USA.