In this Contours Episode, host Carolyn Moorman speaks with New Lines’ own Kallie Mitchell, as well as Dr. Max Thompson, to discuss the intersection between the WPS agenda and sanctions. The pair explain the effects of sanctions on women, as well as the U.S.-led sanction regimes on Uganda, Iran, and more.
Carolyn Moorman:
Hello, and welcome to the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy’s Contours podcast. This is your host, Carolyn Moorman, and today we’ll be exploring the intersection between economic sanctions and gendered impact with the two authors of a recent New Lines report titled Gendering Economic Sanctions: Best Practices for the US.
Before we jump into the podcast, a little bit about the two guests. The first is Kallie Mitchell. Kallie is an analyst for the Gender Policy Portfolio and leads the Women, Peace, and Security Project at New Lines. Prior to joining the Institute, Kallie was a research assistant for the Women, Peace, and Security Program at the International Peace Institute where she focused on gender and U.N. peace operations and women’s participation in peace processes. She previously worked in Stockholm, Sweden, with the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance where she led a project on electoral assistance in transitional elections. Kallie also worked as a research associate at the Institute of Comparative Regional Studies in Denver, co-authoring a U.N. Development Program report on inclusive governance for sustainable peace.
Also, joining us is the other author of the report, Dr. Max Thompson. Max is the deputy head of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst’s Department of Defense and International Affairs. He’s responsible for oversight of the Army’s higher education pathway, which has included integrating WPS, women, peace, and security, into academic exercises. He completed his doctor of philosophy in international relations at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, writing on the role of friendship in US foreign policy and alliance formation. Before arriving at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, he held lectureships at several Oxford colleges and worked as an international consultant at the International Trade Center in Geneva. His research interests include alliance theory, US foreign policy, the development of the liberal world order, human security, and the women, peace, and security agenda. He also recently co-edited and contributed to a report on women, peace, and security in military operations, which considered how militaries can best integrate and apply WPS in their operations.
Now that we’ve gotten through the guests’ extensive backgrounds, I’d like to jump into questions. Starting with you, Kallie. Welcome. While at New Lines, you’ve explored multiple different angles to the women, peace, and security agenda and how its goal is to recognize the role that women play in peace and security and then bring them into the conversation more in the room more when conversations are had about sustainable peace and development. Can you explain a little bit more about what this agenda is, why it’s significant and the US’ role in its implementation?
Kallie Mitchell:
Yeah, thanks so much for having us on, Carolyn. So the women, peace, and security agenda evolved from the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security, and that was unanimously adopted by the Security Council in 2000. Resolution 1325 recognizes and seeks to address the disproportionate impact of armed conflict and war on both women and girls, and it also recognizes the integral role that women play in conflict prevention, resolution, and post-conflict reconstruction. 1325 sets out pillars that will support the objectives of the agenda, which are protection, participation, prevention, and relief and recovery.
Since 1325, the WPS agenda has grown with nine other U.N. resolutions into a global policy framework that calls on U.N. member states to increase the participation of women and to integrate gender perspectives into peace and security work, and to protect women and girls from gender-based violence in conflict settings. So the Obama Administration instituted a US National Action Plan on women, peace, and security in 2011, making the agenda an official priority of the country. Since then, we’ve had four national action plans, although some have been called strategies, and the most recent has been called a Strategy and National Action plan.
In 2017, the Women, Peace, and Security Act was signed into law, which is a landmark legislation that made the US the first country with a comprehensive law on issues of WPS. The act required that the president present WPS strategies and national action plans both in 2019 and in 2023. While these strategies claim to be a whole of government approach, they only list four departments as key agencies who are responsible for implementing WPS and monitoring and reporting their progress towards WPS commitments. And those agencies are the Department of Defense, the Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, and the US Agency for International Development.
The most recent strategy and national action plan, which came out in October 2023, lays out different lines of efforts that the US will take regarding the participation protection and relief and recovery pillars of WPS, and it also lays out efforts to work with partner governments and institutions. Importantly for our report, the 2023 StratNAP includes a line of effort with the institutionalization of WPS across US agencies, policies, and its programs, which opens up an opportunity for the US to consider gender within the context of sanctions policy and to use the WPS principles to improve sanctions programs.
Carolyn Moorman:
Absolutely. Thanks, Kallie, for that really, really good explanation of WPS and how it’s played out into US foreign policy in the past and the room that there is to go with it. So Max, what drew you to collaborate with Kallie on this nexus of WPS and sanctions for this report? Why is this such an interesting and important topic to you?
Dr. Max Thompson:
Well, thanks very much, Carolyn. So look, I was really thrilled when Kallie reached out and asked if I’d like to work with her on this project. So I’ve been interested in the WPS agenda and conflict management for a while, and there were loads of different tools that the United Nations, regional organizations, and individual states can use to try and manage conflicts around the world and promote positive piece. But whereas there’s quite a substantial emerging literature on best practices for how gender sensitive measures can and should be applied to things like preventative diplomacy and mediation, there’s loads of really interesting work about how having more women act as mediators and negotiators and signatories can actually make peace processes last longer and be more resilient. There’s loads of really interesting literature coming out on DDR strategies, so disarmament, demobilization and reintegration strategies, so considering gender responsive strategies here. So ensuring, for example, that you disarm women and child soldiers, ensuring that demobilisation strategies are focused on not just male combatants, but also women and children, for example, security sector reforms and a range of other tools that are used for conflict management.
There is this gap, and there seems to be this gap in how economic sanctions, which are one of the most frequently used tools for conflict management, can be applied in a manner that’s sensitive to the needs of men, women, boys, and girls, and other vulnerable groups. And so I think there’s a gap in the literature, and this is super surprising for loads of reasons. One, is that this is increasingly used, and secondly, women and feminist groups have been involved in advocating, often against the use of economic sanctions, since they were first used in the aftermath of World War I. So again, I think there’s a gap here, which is really interesting and worth investigation.
And similarly, there is, and I know we’re going to probably talk about this later, but there is a drive to impose sanctions and use economic sanctions as a tool for promoting human and women’s rights. And for the United States, this is most notable in President Biden’s 2022 presidential memorandum on promoting accountability for conflict-related sexual violence. Now, this is a really key memorandum because it’s the first time that economic sanctions were mentioned as a possible response to conflict-related sexual violence by a US president. And look, preventing this type of violence is a significant part of the WPS agenda, and so this got us thinking about, well, where else and how else could and should the United States be drawing on the agenda in formulating, implementing, and monitoring sanctions policy? The more we read and the more we looked into documents and policy statements and places where we imagined we would find a trove of evidence of engagement between the Office of Foreign Assets Control, that wider Treasury, and the agenda, the more we didn’t really find any evidence. And so this implies that the gap is potentially worse than we’d originally thought, and so I think that this is the main thing that drove us towards working on this particular report.
Carolyn Moorman:
Absolutely. And so Max gave us a really good intro into how sanctions policy is used by the US to argue for the protection of women and girls through the use of sanctions, but I’m wondering, Kallie, if you could give us a little bit more information about the ways sanctions policy for the US has changed over time.
Kallie Mitchell:
Sure. So the US uses sanctions a lot, and the US has actually imposed two-thirds of all sanctions in the world since 1990. They use them for a variety of reasons, I would take a while to go through all of them, but some are terrorism, undermining of democracy, and nuclear proliferation. So the first key shift that we note in our report is the transition from comprehensive to targeted sanctions. So comprehensive sanctions impose economic restrictions on an entire country, and they were used by many governments in the 20th century. This began to change a bit in the 1990s, which I think Max can talk more about. This began to change in the 1990s, which I’ll let Max talk more about, but we’ve now seen a decrease of comprehensive sanctions and an increase in targeted sanctions, and targeted sanctions focus more on specific entities and individuals rather than an entire country, so hopefully they minimize the negative cascading effects of sanctions on civilians and only impact the people that they’re meant to impact.
Dr. Max Thompson:
Yeah, I can jump in here, if that helps. So one of our key takeaways is that economic sanctions can stifle women and girls’ participation in politics and public life. And when these are applied comprehensively on goods, they tend to have a negative impact on the civilian population’s public health, that access to food, water, and basic goods, including things like medicines. Now, look, of course these types of sanctions do affect everyone, but the effects on women, children, the elderly, minority, and marginalized groups, are often the most acute. And look, to be honest, I’m not entirely certain, and we don’t really explore in the report exactly why this has happened in terms of the shift from comprehensive to targeted sanctions. I think that one thing we do say is that this is a welcome development, but we don’t address it systematically in the report. But when we look at the overarching literature policy statements and speeches, it appears that there has been a welcome normative shift about the appropriateness of states like the United States working within often the United Nations framework using these comprehensive sanctions.
Now, again, I’m not sure exactly why this is the case, but I think largely it’s because of a greater awareness of the humanitarian cost of US sanctions policy. And I think this especially was related to the sanctions applied against Iraq with the US working within the United Nations framework in the 1990s. But when we’re looking at comprehensive sanctions, they often feed into broader humanitarian crises and something that we note in the report is that humanitarian crises are gendered, they have different impacts on men, women, boys, and girls, and often the most acute impacts are felt on those who are most vulnerable and most in need of education, health, and human services.
Kallie Mitchell:
Yeah. And so the second key trend that we talk about in our report that is significant is the increasing use of sanctions to promote and protect human rights and gender equality is a human right. The promotion of human rights became a primary objective within US sanctions policy in the late 1970s under Carter, and between 2009 and 2021, roughly 32% of the sanctions imposed by the United States were to some extent related to human rights and corruption. In 2012, President Obama signed into law the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which was named after a Russian tax advisor who exposed fraud schemes among Russian officials and then subsequently died under suspicious circumstances in a Russian prison. So this legislation imposed sanctions against those who were responsible for Magnitsky’s death and also for similar violations of human rights in Russia. And then in 2016, this act was expanded to punish human rights violations globally.
I’ll also mention that the Global Magnitsky Act and other legislations on human rights sanctions often connect human rights issues with issues of corruption because corruption drives human rights abuses, and it also hinders the effective implementation of human rights obligations by countries. And as Hillary Clinton once said, women’s rights are human rights, so the rise of human rights related sanctions means that more sanctions are going to be used to punish violators of women’s rights too. And while crimes of sexual and gender-based violence have been included under broader human rights sanctions before, the Biden Admin started using sanctions to explicitly target violators of women’s rights in 2022 and has continued to do so in a few notable cases since.
Carolyn Moorman:
So I think it’s fair to say that there have been attempts to further integrate women and children into sanctions policy, but it hasn’t been done enough, obviously. So I’m wondering, Max, how the four pillars of the WPS agenda that Kallie laid out earlier, such as participation, prevention, protection, and then relief and recovery, how you argue in the report those can be better applied to US sanctions policy in general?
Dr. Max Thompson:
Yeah, absolutely. So look, I realized that most of the listeners will already be well versed in the WPS agenda, and Kallie set it up really well up at the start. But I just want to emphasize that the WPS agenda, I think marks a major transformation in how academics, practitioners, and governments should think about security. So it builds on the shift in the early nineties towards a human-centered approach for security, so the security of individual humans matters when thinking about conflict, insecurity, and conflict management. And what the WPS agenda says, it says, well, look, it’s not just about individuals, it’s about understanding that individuals have different needs and different roles, often in conflict, based on the context, age, gender ability, and a whole range of other factors.
So as Kallie set out earlier, the WPS agenda is based on four pillars, and what we do in the report is we seek to frame a lot of the argument we make around those four pillars, and just to reiterate them, they’re participation, protection, prevention, and relief and recovery. Now, these four pillars are all underpinned by gender mainstreaming, and I think gender mainstreaming is where I want to start because it’s a central element of the global WPS agenda, and it underpins everything else. And fundamentally, what it says is that policy makers should consider the gendered impacts any element of public or foreign policy. And spoiler alert, don’t think this is happening enough when thinking about sanctions policy, and I’m sure this isn’t unique to the US, I think this is across lots of countries in the Western world that are increasingly using these sanctions for women’s rights and human rights promotion. So again, sanctions is an increasing part of security policy for a lot of countries, and so we think it’s bizarre that the Treasury is not seen as a key agency with its own implementation plan, monitoring and training processes.
And so we see this as a glaring admission for the US, especially as the Biden administration has advocated, as I mentioned earlier, the use of sanctions to combat conflict-related sexual violence. And the new WPS strategy, a NAP, which came out I think at the end of October, contains this line of effort, which Kallie mentioned, which is all about integrating and institutionalizing WPS principles across government. And so again, the US has claimed to have this whole-of-government approach to WPS, it’s touted this as a big achievement, but we argue that to achieve a genuine whole-of-government approach to WPS, the Treasury has the mainstream gender and sanctions policy, and this is something that isn’t being done.
So how can this happen? Well, we reckon that the WPS provides a framework for doing this. So let’s start off with participation. This is about meaningful engagement with civil society, women’s groups, LGBTQ+ groups. And look, like any policy, sanctions can be applied well or poorly, and what we advocate is saying, look, we need broader engagement with these groups, and we need that engagement to be standard. It needs to be something which is just done prior to the development and implementation of these sanctions. And this should be done both within the US and also outside of the US as well. This is especially the case when the intended aim of those sanctions is in response to the targeting of women’s or LGBTQ rights.
On the second pillar of protection, well, we can build on the work of the presidential memorandum on conflict-related sexual violence and relate it more explicitly to the broader elements of the WPS agenda, and maybe expand this to consider gender-based violence more holistically and thinking about domestic violence more specifically.
On prevention, which is the third pillar. And again, this is often seen as an afterthought when thinking about the women, peace, and security agenda, but we argue that actually this is key when thinking about economic sanctions, and where sanctions have their goal especially in strengthening democratic rights and countering corruption, which is often tied up in greater access for women and greater participation of women, and we think it’s vital that this is done in a gender-sensitive way. And again, one of the key things we advocate is that we need to ensure that future efforts to use sanctions by the US, and indeed any country, as mechanisms to advocate for free and fair elections, need to consider things that often aren’t considered like the needs and the agency of women political prisoners, and some specific barriers to women’s participation.
And then finally, on relief and recovery, the fourth pillar, well, this is about recognizing that women and girls do and can play an active role as agents for change within these activities. But also, the historic sanctions may have undermined gender equality, and ensuring that future use exempts things like health and humanitarian assistance and where we see sanctions relief being applied, this is conditioned on furthering gender equality more broadly. So we think that the four pillars of the WPS provides a really good framework from which an effective economic sanctions policy can be drawn.
Carolyn Moorman:
Also in the report, drawing on what you just said, Max, you and Kallie break down four cases of where the US is targeting a lot of its sanctions, Iran, Venezuela, Uganda, Russia, even the Administration’s rhetoric after the death of Mahsa Amini last year in the protests that occurred in Iran, were following and using this rhetoric to say that sanctions that the US places on Iran is used to protect women and children that face cruelty at the hands of the Iranian regime. And so I’m wondering if you and Kallie, Kallie, we’ll start with you, can break down some of these case studies and what the US is doing wrong and what they’re doing right and areas for improvement.
Kallie Mitchell:
Yeah. So you brought up Iran, which is exactly where I’m going to start, and that was the first case that Max and I wanted to look at since, as you said, the Biden Admin has made two public statements in 2022 and in 2023 about the imposition of sanctions on the Iranian regime and its morality police for their violence against the Iranian women, and their violation of the rights of women to protest, which was in response to the likely murder of Mahsa Amini while in custody of the morality police. Iran is subject to comprehensive sanctions by the US, so Max and I were curious about how, beyond understanding and rhetorically condemning the violations of women’s rights in Iran, these sanctions were actually meant to improve the situation for women. Given that one of the central objectives and core pillars of the WPS agenda is to promote women’s participation in peace and security spaces, it was surprising that there was no mention of the agenda in discussions surrounding the sanctions, given that the sanctions, as I said, were meant to punish those who suppressed women’s right to participate.
Overall, the situation for women in Iran has actually gotten worse since 2022, according to the Women Peace of Security Index, which is published annually by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace & Security. And while the Administration spoke about women’s second class treatment and their exclusion from political and social spheres in Iran, sanctions have in effect made it harder for Iranian women to participate in those spaces. As economic opportunity decreases, women have to spend more time trying to provide for their family and have less time to be active in civic spaces that, while they’re important in the long term to progress gender equality, they don’t really help them make ends meet in the near term. So this highlights the need for more robust monitoring and reporting mechanisms and for close collaboration with women activists and women-led civil society organizations on the ground, who are best placed to determine what action is actually needed to improve their situation. So we need to ensure that the sanctions are having the intended effect and are actually improving the lived realities of women and not hurting them.
Dr. Max Thompson:
Yeah. I’ll talk a bit about Venezuela and then maybe I’ll move on to Uganda. I think that a lot of the themes that are drawn out with Iran are going to be relevant to looking at these other cases as well, particularly when thinking about engagement and monitoring and reporting mechanisms, et cetera. But look, I’ve always been really interested in the US-Venezuelan relationship, and must confess, I hadn’t really looked at it through the lens of sanctions policy, but I found it really interesting exploring this area. So sanctions have been a key part of US policy towards Venezuela since 2014, and the congressional authorization is titled The Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act, so we should think that there should be quite a lot of engagement with women’s groups, human rights groups, and civil society.
Now, look, sanctions on crude oil exports appear to have worsened, I say appear, have definitely worsened the economic downturn that Venezuela has experienced, in spite of humanitarian exceptions that have been put into the law. So I think I mentioned earlier on that humanitarian crises are never gender-neutral, and this is especially the case in a country like Venezuela, and Venezuelan women face a series of challenges, higher unemployment, a collapsing healthcare system, limited access to sexual and reproductive health, and increases in gender-based violence.
So looking at sanctions, again, economic sanctions policy regarding Venezuela does not appear to have mainstreamed gender in any notable way. Though the gendered impact of the conflict and economic crises are clear and well documented, there aren’t these public references to gender vulnerabilities in the formation of policy. And this is especially surprising in the most recent round of sanctions relief. So in September, round of sanctions relief was introduced and there was no mention, there was no real discussion within that, of the different impacts of those sanctions on men, women, boys, and girls, and particularly things like female, women, political prisoners, etc.
So again, what can be done? Well, supporting the meaningful participation of women’s and civil society groups is an important step, and ensuring protection from gender-based and domestic violence is important, strengthening women’s rights and laws and ensuring that relief and recovery efforts are gendered. And this is especially case for those 7.3 million refugees who fled Venezuela over the last few years, many of whom are seeking refuge in the United States. And this really should be at the forefront of the development and monitoring of US sanctions policy towards Venezuela, and we don’t think it is. And so again, relief and recovery efforts, such as humanitarian exceptions to sanctions programs, can be bolstered by engagement with women’s civil society groups in Venezuela to ensure the efforts are effective in addressing gender-specific issues. And again, even more surprising as recent efforts at sanctions relief have not effectively engaged with WPS, and so US sanctions policy must ensure that future efforts to use sanctions as mechanisms to advocate for things like free and fair elections need to consider women political prisoners in Venezuela and broader barriers to women’s participation. So again, Venezuela supports a lot of the same insights that Kallie mentioned in Iran.
So look, Uganda is a case that I’ve found interesting for years, and I think the first time I thought about foreign aid and assistance as coercive tools for governments was actually in the context of the UK government threatening to withhold aid from Uganda when they initially brought in the Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2014. Indeed, I used to actually use this question in interviews. So when I was interviewing for potential candidates at Oxford University, I would ask them whether they felt it was appropriate for a government to withdraw or threaten to withdraw aid based on human rights considerations, and in particularly queer rights, as is the case in Uganda.
So for those unfamiliar, the AHA, this act made ‘aggravated homosexuality’, and I put that in inverted commas, a capital offense. Now, it was struck down by the Ugandan Constitutional Court in 2014, and at that time, the Obama Administration did impose travel restrictions and limits on certain forms of US aid, in spite of the fact that US had a very long-standing relationship with the Ugandan government. Now, look, this year, the AHA is back, and it’s being implemented. So there are two confirmed instances of LGBTQ+ individuals being charged with this capital offense. And the AHA has made Uganda the seventh country in the world to bring in the death penalty for being LGBTQ+, and it’s indeed the only majority Christian country to have done so.
So Biden has been very quick to condemn this. I think he described it as a tragic violation of universal human rights, and he’s described it as fundamentally wrong. There have been some initial travel restrictions, and there’s a lot of noise about, well, there should be economic sanctions, and I personally also think there should be a greater degree of economic sanctions placed on Uganda. I think it’s really welcome that LGBTQ rights are being considered with increasing frequency as part of the women, peace, and security agenda.
But a key point that we’d want to make is that as the US and its allies consider the imposition of further sanctions against Ugandans in response to anti-LGBTQ legislation, there is a need for sanctions policy here, especially to protect affected groups from backlash and targeting. Because authoritarian governments often seek to displace pressure onto vulnerable populations, and so we really need to do this in a very sensitive manner, we need to engage a lot with local actors and activists, we highlight some in the report. And again, sanctions policy doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it needs to go hand-in-hand with efforts diplomatically to strengthen LGBTQ+ rights and law. And here, especially, monitoring reporting mechanisms are going to be particularly important. So ensuring that it’s not just about good intentions, it’s about how is this going to be effectively implemented to achieve the best results for the LGBTQ+ people on the ground who are incredibly vulnerable In Uganda? We talk about some of the vulnerabilities they’ve faced in the last six months in the report.
Kallie Mitchell:
And I’ll round out this discussion of the case studies with our case on Russia, which is one of the world’s most heavily sanctioned countries, and I think it’s one of the first countries that you think of when you think of human rights related sanctions, given that so much of the US legislation of the Magnitsky Act came about because of Russia’s violations of human rights. And then with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, conflict related sexual violence, and I’m going to use the acronym CRSV because it’s a tongue twister, CRSV has become a big topic when discussing Russia’s crimes as it’s been pretty widespread since the start of the invasion. And despite the fact that Biden has mentioned these crimes in statements issuing sanctions against other actors for crimes of CRSV, and these sanctions did draw from the presidential memo that we mentioned earlier, there have been no indications that the admin is going to apply any of the accountability tools that are outlined in the memo to sanction Russia for crimes of sexual violence.
And while there are other country-specific sanctions programs that do apply to Russia and include crimes of CRSV, they don’t include the same gender considerations that the memo does in regard to investigating, monitoring, and reporting crimes of CRSV. And CRSV is a really challenging crime to investigate so the task of holding perpetrators accountable is only made more difficult without those gender-specific considerations for doing so. If the considerations made in the memo were mainstreamed across all sanctions policy, it would improve prevention and protection work.
Also, as I mentioned, the Iran case, sex and disaggregated data is always a good idea, but specifically for Russia, it’s important to recognize CRSV against men and boys. And given the sensitivity and difficulty surrounding crimes of CRSV and any gender-based crime really, having consultations with, and the participation of grassroots and civil society organizations, who know where these crimes are happening and know the cultural context involved in investigating, will only improve the efforts to hold the perpetrators accountable.
Carolyn Moorman:
Absolutely. And thank you so much, both of you, for going into such great, really helpful detail about all of these four countries, which are very central to US sanctions policy right now. And you’ve also both done a really great job of folding all of the policy recommendations that you make into the report into your answers to these questions. But as we close out the episode, I’d like to give both of you a final word, the floor, to talk about any further recommendations you have for the US government to integrate the WPS agenda into sanctions policy. So we’ll start with Max and then turn to Kallie.
Dr. Max Thompson:
Yeah, please do go ahead and read the report where we set out all these recommendations in more detail. But look, we make a series of recommendations for what the US can do to integrate WPS. And I think that just the key point I’d like to make is that the US, like loads of countries, and I’m from the UK, we make the same claims, has made all these claims about how seriously they take the agenda, how important is the security, and they tout their whole-of-government approach, this idea that there’s a whole-of-government approach to implementing this. This was really essential within the 2017 law, within the 2019 strategy, and indeed within the 2023 strategy. And so, well, look, to make this a reality, that really involves gender mainstreaming all aspects of foreign and security and domestic policy as well. Now, look, rightly or wrongly, economic sanctions are being used with increasing frequency, and as they’re being used, particularly for conflict management, it’s essential that they are practiced in a gender sensitive manner.
Kallie Mitchell:
Yeah, Max said it well, and I’ll also just add that if sanctions are going to be used, which it seems like they will, to promote and protect women’s rights, and to further US geopolitical interest, the outcomes of these programs could be really greatly improved by aligning sanctions policy processes with the US’s state commitments to WPS principles and to gender equality across foreign policy. And to do that, the US should work to formalize WPS commitments into sanctions policy and to develop guidance for integrating gender considerations into sanctions design, implementation, and reporting, which can be done by designating the Treasury as a key WPS implementing agency into future national action plans and strategies to establish an implementation plan for them. The Treasury can also support these efforts by establishing a gender or WPS focal point in their sanctions work, and Congress can also support it by allocating funding to research activities that will help us to better understand the gendered impacts of sanctions.
Carolyn Moorman:
Well, I’d like to thank both Kallie and Max for coming onto the podcast today. This has been a wonderful discussion. Our listeners can read the full report on our website, www.newlinesinstitute.org, and you can also check out further work of the gender portfolio in the institute and other geopolitical-related work there. You can also subscribe to Contour’s podcast wherever you get your episodes so that you don’t miss our next talk with people like Kallie and Max. Thank you for listening and all the best.
